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Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2015
Edited by Björn Köhnlein and Jenny Audring
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 32] 2015
► pp. 33–47

Three types of suffixes in French

Discarding the learned / non-learned distinction

| University of Amsterdam

Traditionally a two-way distinction is made in French between learned and non-learned suffixes, based on etymology. However, this distinction does not account for all suffixes. Furthermore, suffixes are traditionally considered as categorial heads, but some suffixes derive words of multiple categories. This paper proposes an alternative analysis of French suffixes, distinguishing three instead of two types, using a theory by Creemers et al. (2015) proposed for Dutch. In their analysis in the framework of Distributed Morphology, Creemers et al. distinguish three instead of two types of suffixes, proposing an alternative to Lowenstamm (2010). Starting from their proposal, we show that it is possible to distinguish three types of suffixes in French as well, accounting for the categorial flexibility of some suffixes, without resorting to the vague distinction between learned and non-learned.

Keywords: morphological derivation, Distributed Morphology, learned vs. non-learned, French, categorial flexibility
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 17 December 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.32.03don
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Gouskova, Maria
2023. Phonological Asymmetries between Roots and Affixes. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Morphology, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Sleeman, Petra
2023. Zero-suffixes and their alternatives: A view from French. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 42:1 ► pp. 63 ff. DOI logo

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