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Article published In:
Issues in Diachronic Construction Morphology
Edited by Muriel Norde and Graeme Trousdale
[Constructions and Frames 15:2] 2023
► pp. 187–210

The rise and fall of morphological schemas

A diachronic account of entre-prefixation in French

ORCID logo | University of Turin
| Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

The paper explores the origin and development of the [entre-V] construction in the history of French. By means of quantitative corpus data, it is shown that the [entre-V] construction, particularly in its reciprocal function, is productive in earlier stages of French and progressively disappears over time. We argue that this decrease in productivity is connected to the change in availability of the more abstract [pref-V] construction. While Old French still shows residual stages of Latin prefixation, this system dissolves in the history of French. As speakers have less access to the [pref-V] construction, this also engenders numerous changes in the constructional network of the [entre-V] construction.

Keywords: reciprocity, prefixation, constructional networks, French, Latin
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The diachrony of French verbal prefixes
  • 3.The [entre-V] construction in the history of French
    • 3.1The corpus
    • 3.2The [entre-V] construction in OF
      • 3.2.1The semantics of the [entre-V] construction in OF
      • 3.2.2Reciprocal entre- in OF: Where is the reciprocal meaning encoded?
      • 3.2.3Morphosyntactic properties of the [entre-V] reciprocal schema
    • 3.3The [entre-V] construction over time: A quantitative approach
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1The origin of the French [entre-V] construction
      • 4.1.1The Latin sources of French entre-
      • 4.1.2The emergence of French [entre-V]
      • 4.1.3Where does reciprocal [entre-V] come from?
    • 4.2The decline of the French [entre-V] construction
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Digital resources
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

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

Published online: 8 January 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.00072.ing
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Digital resources

Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND)
[URL]
Base de Français Médiéval (BFM)
[URL]
Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (FEW)
[URL]