Elements de morphologie du tahitien; derivation et composition
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Paris 3Disciplines:
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Abstract EN:
Tahitian is a polynesian language that belongs to the austronesian family and which is spoken mainly in the islands-of-the-society archipelago. It is estimated that about 150. 000 people use this language. Tahitian is characterized by a limited number of phonemes and a simple morphology. Before studying the derivation and the composition, it was necessary to find a classification (chapter 2). Therefore, distributional criterion have been organized into a hierarchy and used to make the difference between the category index and the functional level. As a result, sixteen categories of words (or parts of speech) and eight grammatical categories have been obtained. The study of the derivation has been divided into two parts : on the hand, the affixal derivation and on the other hand, the inflectional derivation (chap. 3) the prefixal derivation has been studied from two points of view, formal and functional. There is only a small change in the form of the prefixes : from the funtional point of view, some are stem-formative of verbs or of nouns, others can constitute either nouns or verbs. We have been able to isolate only four suffixes, two of them being productive; the first one is used to constitute the nouns and the other the verbs. In order to study the inflectional derivation, an analysis of the derivation by quantitative inflection and by reduplication has been necessary thus bringing out that the former is not very productive and is used mainly to constitute verbs. The reduplication which is, on the contrary, very productive is used to make up nouns as well as verbs. The composition is the last part in this chapter. The compounded words have been studied according to the final category, the number of the components and their classification. This study has enabled us to bring out that most of the compounded words have been constituted according to the usual syntactic rules of the noun phrases.
Abstract FR:
Le tahitien est une langue polynesienne appartenant a la famille des langues austronesiennes et parlee principalement dans l'archipel des iles-de-lasociete. Le nombre de locuteurs est estime a environ 150. 000. Cette langue possede un nombre de phonemes restreint (neuf consonnes et dix voyelles) et une morphologie simple (cf. Chapitre 1 : iii). Avant d'aborder l'etude de la derivation et de la composition, il etait necessaire de proceder auparavant a la recherche des categories (chapitre 2). Cette etude a ete menee en utilisant des criteres distributionnels et hierarchises qui permettent de differencier le niveau categoriel et le niveau fonctionnel. Les resultats ont abouti a seize classes de mots et a huit categories grammaticales. L'etude de la derivation a ete divisee en deux parties : derivation affixale et derivation flexionnelle (cf. Chapitre 3). La derivation par prefixation a ete etudiee du point de vue formel (cf. Morphologie). Et fonctionnel. Il y a peu d'alterations formelles des prefixes; du point de vue fonctionnel, certains sont des formants specifiques de verbes ou de noms, d'autres sont indifferencies (formation de noms et de verbes). Nous n'avons isole que quatre suffixes dont deux productifs, l'un servant a former des noms et l'autre, les verbes. La derivation flexionnelle a consiste en l'analyse de la derivation par flexion quantitative et par redoublement, ce qui a permis de mettre en evidence que la flexion quantitative est peu productive et sert principalement a former des verbes. Le redoublement, fortement productif, permet aussi bien de former des noms que des verbes. La composition constitue la derniere partie de ce chapitre. Les composes ont ete consideres selon leur categorie d'arrivee, le nombred'elements composants et la categorie des elements composants. Il ressort de cette etude que la majorite des composes ont ete formes sur le modele d'un syntagme de determination courant dans la langue.