Étude des relations entre productivité et polysémie dans les processus de formation de mots : le cas de l’espagnol
This thesis deals with the process of word formation. We assume that productivity and polysemy are guiding the speakers in the way they create words. To confirm this assumption, we have studied the list of Spanish words with suffixes included in the “Diccionario de los sufijos de la lengua española (DISULE)” by Silvia Faitelson-Weiser (2010, cf. www.sufijos.lli.ulaval.ca ). We have evaluated the levels of productivity and polysemy of each segment identified as a suffix. We have then correlated the values thus reached for each feature. In this approach, which we have fully tested, the morpheme is recognized as a unit of analysis in line with the grammatical model Item and arrangement (Hockett, 1954). Even though our analysis did not enable us to find strong correlations between the two variables for all suffixes, when we define specific contexts of competition, we see that the relations between productivity and polysemy are following specific patterns. We also notice that the chosen pattern is more effective to describe polysemy than to explain productivity. We are thus led to question how relevant the opposition between word and morpheme, as units of analysis, really is. Our study focuses on these two notions of morphology.
Word formation Productivity Polysemy Competition Spanish