–iser and –ifier suffixations in French: Verify data to verize hypotheses ?
Résumé
Building change of state verbs from nouns or adjectives may be realized by means of various morphological processes: prefixation by a , en , dé e.g. APLATIR ‘to flatten’, EMBELLIR ‘to embellish’ or DÉNEIGER ‘to clear the snow’; conversion e.g. BEURRER ‘to butter’, ROUGIR ‘to turn red’; iser and ifier suffixations e.g. RIDICULISER ‘to ridicule’ and EXEMPLIFIER ‘to exemplify’. The aim of this work is to identify the parameters governing the choice between the word formation rules. We will first focus on constructed forms from the Trésor de la Langue Française Informatisé. Then we will assess the hypotheses established from this first corpus with a corpus of neologisms. We intend to show that ifier suffixation is now an ancillary suffixation, whose only role is to compensate for the morphophonological deficiency of iser suffixation.