Download One finds in French a number of nouns with a

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.