We examine a case of base variation related to property noun formation, viz.-ité-suffixed French nouns expressing the character proper both to those who belong/are related to a place (town, country…) and/or to the place itself (henceforth Ethnic Property Nouns (EPNs)). The study is based on a web-extracted corpus and shows that speakers largely coin EPNs either from toponyms (portugal > portugalité ‘Portugal-ness’ = ‘Portugueseness’), from related ethnic adjectives (afrique ‘Africa’ > africain ‘African’ > africanité ‘Africanness’) or from both (belgique ‘Belgium‘ > belgicité ‘Belgium-ness’; belge ‘Belgian’ > belgité ‘Belgianness’). The examples show that these base variations are unrelated to meaning but rather correlate with four formal competing constraints: one of them, i.e. what we call ‘lexical pressure’, can explain the form of the output. We then describe a survey experiment, which corroborates our analysis. Finally, the scope of our conclusions goes beyond French EPNs, as they apply to other word formation rules in many languages.
2019. Competition in Derivation: What Can We Learn from French Doublets in -age and -ment?. In Competition in Inflection and Word-Formation [Studies in Morphology, 5], ► pp. 67 ff.
Dal, Georgette, Fiammetta Namer, F. Neveu, G. Bergounioux, M.-H. Côté, J.-M. Fournier, L. Hriba & S. Prévost
2016. À propos des occasionnalismes. SHS Web of Conferences 27 ► pp. 08002 ff.
Dal, Georgette & Fiammetta Namer
2015. La fréquence en morphologie : pour quels usages ?. Langages N° 197:1 ► pp. 47 ff.
Koehl, Aurore & Stéphanie Lignon
2014. Property nouns with -ité and -itude: formal alternation and morphopragmatics or the sad-itude of the Aité N. Morphology 24:4 ► pp. 351 ff.
Laks, Lior
2013. Why and how do Hebrew verbs change their form? A morpho-thematic account. Morphology 23:3 ► pp. 351 ff.
Laks, Lior
2015. Variation and change in instrument noun formation in Hebrew and its relation to the verbal system. Word Structure 8:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Laks, Lior
2024. Semantic transparency and doublet formation: the case of Hebrew location nouns. Morphology 34:3 ► pp. 219 ff.
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