When morphology meets regular polysemy

Abstract

This study investigates the existence of complex morphological patterns that include a regular polysemy extension. Such complex patterns derive ambiguous words whose semantic types are both related and specified. To address this issue, nouns derived from verbs in French are investigated. A sample of 2,953 deverbal nouns ending with 46 suffixes are collected and systematically analyzed with respect to semantic properties and lexical ambiguity. Thirty-eight complex patterns are identified. The formation of ambiguous nouns whose meanings fit into a regular polysemy pattern appears as a discriminative property of some suffixes. Different kinds of patterns are further distinguished, depending on whether secondary meanings in complex patterns can be directly related to a base verb or not. In accordance with the literature on the polysemy of nominalizations, the semantic categories of EVENT and RESULT are prominent in morphological patterns, but other semantic types such as AGENT, INSTITUTION and COGNITIVE OBJECT are importantly represented as well. In addition, metonymy is the main semantic figure observed in complex patterns. Overall, the article sheds new light on the relationship between word formation and lexical polysemy by describing the possibility of direct association between them.