Nominalization, verbalization or both? Insights from the directionality of noun-verb conversion in French
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- handle: 10670/1.66doip
- halshs: halshs-03550850
- doi: 10.3726/zwjw.2020.02.10
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Delphine Tribout, « Nominalization, verbalization or both? Insights from the directionality of noun-verb conversion in French », HAL-SHS : linguistique, ID : 10.3726/zwjw.2020.02.10
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Résumé
Nominalization in French can be done by means of conversion, which is characterized by the identity between the base and the derived lexeme. Since both noun→verb and verb→noun conversions exist, this property raises directionality issues, and sometimes leads to contradictory analyses of the same examples. The paper presents two approaches of conversion: derivational and non-derivational ones. Then it discusses various criteria used in derivational approaches to determine the direction of conversion: diachronic ones, such as dates of first attestation or etymology; and synchronic ones, such as semantic relations, noun gender or verb inflection. All criteria are evaluated on a corpus of 3,241 French noun~verb pairs. It is shown that none of them enables to identify the direction of conversion in French. Finally, the consequences for the theory of morphology are discussed.