De l'attribution du genre aux mots nouveaux dans la langue francaise
Institution:
Toulouse 2Disciplines:
Directors:
Abstract EN:
Our purpose was first to account for gender assignment to new words. On a corpus of 7000 french nouns, in connection with the different types of word formation (derivatives, compounds, loan words, etc. ). In some cases, the choice of gender may be attributable to a single factor, but it is generally the result of competing influences (endocentric, exocentric, morphophonological, semantic, etc. ). Historically, the proportion of masculines among new words has been growing from old french to the present day. The principal reasons are the increasing role of masculine as "unmarked" gender, the decline of some patterns of word formation, the changes in the origin of loan words, etc. The part played by grammatical gender to structure the french vocabulary tends to decrease on the morphophonological field (the connections between gender and word endings are weakening), and becomes semantically more important (development and analogical series). The balance between masculine and feminine has been upset in favour of the masculine not only from a quantitative point of view, but also from a quantitative one : the masculine vocabulary is more varied, more valued than the feminine one.
Abstract FR:
A partir d'un corpus dictionnairique de plus de 7000 noms, l'objectif principal de la recherche etait de rendre compte de l'attribution du genre aux mots nouveaux, en liaison avec les divers processus neologiques (derivation, composition, emprunt, etc. ). Elle a permis de definir les differentes logiques qui s'exercent tour a tour ou simultanement: endocentrique, exocentrique, morphophonologue, semantique ; neutralisation du genre. L'attribution du genre resulte le plus souvent d'un rapport de forces entre facteurs concurrents ou antagonistes. Historiquement, leur importance respective a evolue. Pour des raisons a la fois structurelles (role du masculin comme genre non marque) et conjoncturelles (tarissement de certaines formations, origine des emprunts, etc. ), la proportion des masculins parmi les mots nouveaux tend a augmenter. Le role du genre dans la structuration du lexique est decroissant sur le plan morphophonologique (affaiblissement des associations entre genre et type de finale), et croissant sur le plan semantique (constitution de series analogiques). Au desequilibre quantitatif entre les genres s'ajoute un desequilibre qualitatif: le lexique masculin est plus varie et plus valorise que le lexique feminin.