Distributional semantics insights on agentive suffix rivalry in French
BLE-BLL
- Huyghe, Richard ORCID University of Fribourg
- Wauquier, Marine ORCID University of Paris
- 2021
Published in:
- Word Structure. - Edinburgh University Press. - 2021, vol. 14, no. 3, p. 354-391
English
The formation of French agent nouns (ANs) involves a large variety of morphological constructions, and particularly of suffixes. In this study, we focus on the semantic counterpart of agentive suffix diversity and investigate whether the morphological variety of ANs correlates with different agentive subtypes. We adopt a distributional semantics approach and combine manual, computational and statistical analyses applied to French ANs ending in -aire, -ant, -eur, -ien, -ier and -iste. Our methodology allows for a large-scale study of ANs and involves both top-down and bottom-up procedures. We first characterize agentive suffixes with respect to their morphosemantic and distributional properties, outlining their specificities and similarities. Then we automatically cluster ANs into distributionally relevant subsets and examine their properties. Based on quantitative analysis, our study provides a new perspective on agentive suffix rivalry in French that both confirms existing claims and sheds light on previously unseen phenomena.
- Faculty
- Faculté des lettres et des sciences humaines
- Department
- Département de français
- Language
-
- English
- License
- License undefined
- Open access status
- green
- Identifiers
-
- DOI 10.3366/word.2021.0194
- ISSN 1750-1245
- Persistent URL
- https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/320923
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