Lefer, Marie-Aude
[UCL]
(eng)
This thesis presents a contrastive analysis of prefixation in English and French writing. More generally, it provides new insights into the under-researched area of contrastive lexical morphology through the use of corpus data and corpus linguistic tools and methods. The thesis has three major objectives:
• Descriptive objective: two contradictory statements are commonly reported in the largely introspection-based contrastive literature. First, it is claimed that derivation tends to be more productive in English than in French (e.g. Vinay & Darbelnet 1958/1995, Van Hoof 1989, Van Roey 1990). This major cross-linguistic difference, it is argued, results in translation difficulties to render English derivatives in French (e.g. use of multi-word units and paraphrases). Even though this claim seems at least partly intuitively valid (notably in view of the coexistence of two stocks of affixes in English, one Romance and the other Germanic), there is still no solid empirical evidence to confirm it. In addition, the claim is in contradiction with the observation made in some studies that Germanic languages tend to favour compounding (the combination of two base words) while Romance languages have a predilection for derivation (e.g. Bauer 1978, Chuquet & Paillard 1987). A pilot study devoted to English and French derived adjectives (Lefer 2004) has suggested that the first claim from the literature should be qualified, as it downplays the productivity of the French derivational system. As pointed out by Granger(1996b:40), “intuitions are rarely “wrong” but […] they often give only a partial – and hence often misleading – view of reality.” This thesis aims to address the introspection-based claims made in the contrastive literature by providing a detailed contrastive analysis of prefixation in English and French, thereby filling a gap in morphological research, where prefixation is clearly neglected compared to suffixation and compounding (Schröder 2008a). In addition, the approach to prefixation adopted here is innovative in that it takes into account prefixation as a whole (macro-approach) and focuses on its semantic aspects, which makes it possible to describe some of the interactions between lexical morphology and lexis or grammar. Word-formation studies, by contrast, traditionally focus on a particular affix (micro-approach) and tend to relegate semantic issues to the background.
• Theoretical objective: the theoretical objective of the thesis is threefold.
o First, the thesis addresses the theoretical issue of the tertium comparationis (TC) in contrastive lexical morphology. Issues in connection with the TC are often treated only marginally in cross-linguistic research, where the emphasis tends to fall on actual practice and applications (Fisiak 1980, Krzeszowski 1990), which seriously undermines the scientific rigour of contrastive studies.
o Second, the thesis examines the constructs of ‘prefix’ and ‘derivative’ from a contrastive perspective. Even though these terms are commonly used, they lack a clear definition that would enable researchers to study prefixation cross-linguistically. I thus aim to provide clear and consistent criteria for affixhood and derivativeness.
o Finally, the study assesses the impact of stylistic variation on the productivity and, to a lesser extent, frequency of English and French prefixes in writing, thereby establishing links between word-formation and stylistic variation. Corpus-based morphological studies (e.g. Baayen 1994, Plag et al. 1999) have shown that the use of derivational morphology greatly varies across registers and genres. This indicates that the claims from the contrastive literature, which presents languages as monolithic entities, could probably be qualified on the basis of variationist data. In this respect, it should be noted that variationist studies are scarce (especially in French word-formation) and have been mainly devoted to suffixes. In this thesis, prefixation is studied in three main genres (novels, newspaper editorials and research articles) and in three academic disciplines (economics, linguistics and medicine).
• Methodological objective: In order to test the contradictory claims made in the contrastive literature, a corpus linguistic approach to contrastive lexical morphology is adopted. The thesis discusses the strengths and shortcomings of comparable corpora and, to a lesser extent, translation corpora to test these claims. In order to achieve this objective, I aim to develop a corpus linguistic framework for the extraction and analysis of prefixed words across languages.
The thesis is organised in seven chapters.
Chapter 1 opens by reflecting on the position occupied by contrastive lexical morphology in the three major fields of which it partakes, viz. morphology, contrastive linguistics and lexicology. It shows that contrastive lexical morphology is the parent pauvre in each of these three fields. It then offers a review of studies in contrastive lexical morphology, covering a period of c. 50 years. Finally, it discusses the main claims on lexical morphology from the English-French contrastive literature and presents the findings of a number of corpus-based studies that cast doubt on their validity.
Chapter 2 is dedicated to the establishment of a contrastive methodological framework for the analysis of lexical morphology across languages. Following the methodology advocated by the major reference works in contrastive linguistics (e.g. James 1980, Krzeszowski 1990), it describes the objects to be compared across languages, viz. ‘derivative’ and ‘prefix’, and establishes a semantic tertium comparationis to ensure that we are comparing like with like.
Chapter 3 deals with the much-debated concept of derivational productivity. It offers a survey of the major definitions of the concept and presents the definition of productivity adopted in this thesis (realised productivity, i.e. the number of different words formed with an affix in a given corpus). It then proposes an overview of the methodologies available to study productivity and focuses on the pros and cons of the corpus-based approach.
Chapter 4 is devoted to a detailed discussion of the corpora and semi-automatic methodology used in the thesis. The chapter presents the comparable corpus of novels, research articles and newspaper editorials in English and French. It also briefly introduces the bidirectional translation corpus used in the second stage of the analysis. The chapter then presents the semi-automatic methodology adopted, viz. automatic retrieval and manual editing, which is based on the criteria of analysability, existence of a derivational paradigm and semantic transparency.
Chapters 5 and 6 are dedicated to the monolingual descriptions of prefixation in English and French writing, respectively. Broad monolithic trends are presented alongside variationist results (variation across genres and academic disciplines). Chapter 5 also examines the role played by Romance prefixation in English writing.
Chapter 7 presents the results of the comparable corpus analysis and revisits the largely introspection-based claims made in the contrastive literature. The second part of the chapter deals with the issue of the translation of prefixed words in both translation directions: from English to French and French to English. Finally, the place of lexical morphology in English-French bilingual dictionaries is assessed.
The thesis ends with a number of concluding remarks which summarise the major findings of the contrastive study and the implications and applications of the research for a number of fields, such as contrastive linguistics, morphology, vocabulary learning and teaching, lexicography and natural language processing.


Bibliographic reference |
Lefer, Marie-Aude. Exploring lexical morphology across languages : a corpus-based study of prefixation in English and French writing. Prom. : Granger, Sylviane |
Permanent URL |
http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/24939 |