Mafiosi, ravioli and picadores: about the “romance” plural in contemporary french
Mafiosi, raviolis et picadores. À propos du pluriel "roman" en français contemporain
Résumé
There are in contemporary French about 2400 lexical units borrowed from Romance languages. Most of these units are nouns. From the morphological point of view, the plural of the majority of these nouns is adapted to the grammatical system of French (they are invariable in spoken French and have the plural mark in written language). Only a few loans keep signs of non-French plural. In this paper, we analyze the morphological markers of the “Romance” plural in French on the basis of the typological grouping of the Romance languages into two categories, Western and Eastern. Our study demonstrates that one can find in contemporary French some special models of plural formation: 1) the Eastern Romance model on vowel -i, for a number of nouns of Italian and Sardinian origin; 2) the Western Romance model on consonant -s pronounced in some words of Spanish origin keeping the graphic and phonetic affix -s; 3) non-standard plural forms with base change. Nouns of the first and second clusters are adapted by passing in the invariable class, while the third group tends towards the French peripheral plural (suppletion or replacement base change).