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Download One finds in French a number of nouns with a
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Troubles with property nouns paired with adjectives in Romance Françoise Kerleroux, Université Paris 10 et Modyco (UMR 7114 du CNRS) et Alain Kihm, Laboratoire de Linguistique formelle (UMR 7110 du CNRS) CNRS – Université Paris 7 One finds in French a number of nouns with a -ion suffix which are formally and semantically related to adjectives, e.g. abjection related to abject, or (in)correction related to (in)correct. As the examples show, however, two cases must be distinguished. In the case represented by abjection, the adjective abject stands by itself. In the other case, in contrast, there is a verb corriger to which correction may also be related as a deverbal noun to its base verb. Both types present a morphological peculiarity, namely that -ion does not normally belong to the inventory of deadjectival suffixes, being a deverbal suffix. See following table: Adj. fidèle exact lourd N fidél-ité exact-itude lourd-eur V convertir submerger admirer N -ion conversion submersion admiration In addition, forms like correction are semantically peculiar in that they systematically exhibit an ambiguity between a property reading possibly related to the adjective, as in La correction de ce policier m’a étonné(e) ‘This policeman’s correctness amazed me’; and a process reading possibly related to the verb, as in La correction de cet article a pris des mois ‘Correcting this paper took months’. Naturally, nouns like abjection with no related verb do not show this ambiguity and have the property reading only. Other Romance languages, namely Italian and Spanish behave very much like French in this area, except that the former formally distinguishes the process from the property reading in a few cases: cf. correzzione ‘correction’ vs. correttezza ‘correctness’. Yet, one also finds many cases such as moderazione, meaning both the action of moderating and the property of being moderate. A very interesting language here is Portuguese (see Teyssier). Like French (and Italian and Spanish) Portuguese has pairs where an adjective stands next to a verb, and a noun ending in -ion’s equivalent, -ão, is related to the adjective: e.g., confundir ‘to confuse’, confuso ‘confused’, confusão ‘confusion, confusedness’. As can be seen, such nouns manifest the same ambiguity as do their French counterparts. However, Portuguese also presents thirty-ish triplets consisting in a verb and two past participles, one active, the other passive. For instance, acender ‘to light’ shows active acendido vs. passive aceso/a as in A criança tinha acendido (*aceso) uma vela ‘The child had lit a candle’ vs. Uma vela foi acesa (*acendida) pela criança ‘A candle was lit by the child’. Such a voice contrast with participles is quite unheard of in the other Romance languages and beyond (see Aronoff 1994). (Within IndoEuropean, only the Slavic languages have this contrast, it seems.) In such twin participles, it is the passive twin that is used adjectivally: cf. A criança entrou com uma vela acesa (*acendida) ‘The child entered with a lighted candle’. Moreover, when there is a related noun, it shares its base with the passive participle: cf. exprimir ‘to express’, exprimido, expresso, expressão ‘expression’; emergir ‘to emerge’, emergido, emerso, emersão ‘emerging, emergedness’ 2 One would think that such a voice contrast would have given Portuguese a way to lift the process vs. property ambiguity. Why, for instance, don’t we find *emergimento using the base of the active participle to mean ‘emerging’, contrasting with emersão whose sole reading would then be ‘the property of being emerged, emergedness’. Yet, Portuguese speakers never availed themselves of this opportunity. Nouns such as expressão are just as ambiguous as their other Romance counterparts. This gives strong support to a conclusion independently achieved for the latter, namely that they never were derived in any relevant sense of the term from the corresponding adjectives and/or past participles, but they were borrowed ready-made from Classical Latin derived nouns in -io or modelled after them at some stage in late Latinity (see Kerleroux to appear). Lexical networks were thus created involving a verb (e.g., corriger, emergir), an adjective and/or past participle (e.g., correct, emerso), and a noun (e.g., correction, emersão). Such networks raise problems for morphological theory. While the relation of active or regular past participles (corrigé, emergido) to the other forms is probably inflectional, inflection or derivation do not seem to be the building principles for these networks. Rather, we are dealing with sets, the members of which are phonologically distinct, but lexically closely related stems, e.g. /koriž/ and /korekt/, /emerž/ and /emers/ (see the notion of espace thématique in Bonami, Boyé & Kerleroux to appear). The distinctive character of stem sets involving verbs, adjectives and/or past participles, and property/process nouns in French and Portuguese is then that the nouns may be proved not to be ‘native’ members, having belonged to the sets for as far back in the languages’ history as one can reach, but to have been annexed to the sets in the course of recorded time. Romance languages thus contrast sharply with the Germanic languages, in which specialized suffixes productively derive unambiguous property nouns from adjectives, thus forming quasi-paradigms: cf. German and English Befriedigtheit ‘contentedness’, as distinct from Befriedigung ‘contenting, appeasement’. References Aronoff, Mark. 1994. Morphology by Itself. Cambridge (Mass.) : MIT Press. Bonami, Olivier, Gilles Boyé & Françoise Kerleroux. To appear. « L’allomorphie radicale et la relation flexion-construction ». In B. Fradin, F. Kerleroux et M. Plénat (eds), Aperçus de morphologie du français. St Denis : Presses Universitaires de Vincennes. Kerleroux, Françoise. To appear. “Des noms indistincts”. In B. Fradin (ed.), La raison morphologique. Hommage à Danielle Corbin. Amsterdam : Benjamins. Teyssier, Paul. 1976. Manuel de langue portugaise, Portugal – Brésil. Paris : Klincksieck.