Nouvelles approches en morphologie (review)

Among the French textbooks on morphology that have appeared over the last years, Fradin’s volume stands out, both in its focus on theory, as well as in the variety of languages discussed (although all non-French data is taken from secondary sources). Parts of the text have previously appeared elsewhere; nonetheless, the book follows a consistent concept.

After an introduction (Ch. 1, 5–26), in which F argues for the autonomy of morphology within a grammatical system, the first half of the book in three chapters develops the evolution from morphemic to lexeme-based approaches. Ch. 2 (29–78) devotes nine pages to the motivation of item-and-arrangement morphology and forty pages to its descriptive and conceptual shortcomings, discussing ‘semantically empty segmental material’, nonconcatenative and nonsegmental morphological exponence, and zero morphemes. F argues that even for agglutinating morphology, structuralist morphemic analysis leaves much to be desired. ‘Classical’ word-and-paradigm models are presented in Ch. 3 (79–135) and evaluated in Ch. 4 (137–77). F concentrates on word-formation rules and their phonological implementation. Surprisingly little space is assigned to declarative, constraint-based approaches, although their superiority in terms of descriptive adequacy is acknowledged. In F’s view, lexemes need to provide separate phonological, orthographic, syntactic, and semantic representations; information about inflectional class membership is relegated to the syntactic component. F addresses the structure of inflectional paradigms only in passing and simply presupposes a strict demarcation between inflection and derivation. However, F takes great pains to demonstrate how such a lexeme-based approach can help in formulating generalizations ranging from phonaesthemic preferences to systematic word-class conversion and valency alternations. At this point, the reader is sometimes left wondering whether all of these topics should really be covered by a morphological theory.

The second half of the book argues for the ‘lexical anchoring’ (l’ancrage lexical) of morphology. Ch. 5 (181–234) traces the evolution of models for the lexicon from lists to complex hierarchies and, somewhat abruptly, continues with a formal classification of complex lexical units in French. In Ch. 6 (235–61), using interesting French data, F demonstrates that processes of word formation apply to semantically fully specified forms, leading him to the conclusion that underspecified lexical entries cannot be the sole elements of the lexicon. Two in-depth case studies from French in Ch. 7 (263–307), on the generality and productivity of -able (including the variants -ible and -uble) and on parasynthetic formations ending in -ure, demonstrate that some, but not all, word-formation rules display prototypicality effects.

The book would be easier to read if editorial principles had been stricter. Some of the abbreviations used in the text are missing from the list of abbreviations. Not all of F’s shorthand notations qualify as mnemonic devices (A.1, for instance, means ‘lack of alternation’), and some, like D for ‘adverb’, are apt to confuse the reader. Nonetheless, this monograph offers not only thought-provoking explorations of French word formation and lexicology, but also a fresh French look at morphological theory in general.