MORPHOLOGICAL COMPETITION, BLOCKING AND RESISTANCE: EVIDENCE FROM THE ENGLISH -ITY/-NESS AND THE FRENCH -AGE/-MENT

Abstract

The Morphological Module of the generative grammar focuses on the innate ability of an ideal speaker of a language to produce infinite words. In this sense, an ideal user of any language, such as English or French, has a mental linguistic capacity to produce new words that are grammatical, even if the word is not yet in popular usage. This study is rooted in the I-language dimension of the Chomskyan generative grammar. Using the constructional morphology model of the lexeme-based morphological analysis, the study selected a pair each of English and French suffixes, that are prone to rivalry. The suffixal pairs are the English nominal suffixes -ity and -ness and those of French -age and -ment.  For the purpose of analysis, data was sourced from British National Corpus for the English pair and French Web 2023 for that of French.  Twenty competing words are randomly selected from the raw data for each of the languages and both qualitative and quantitative analysis was done on them to study three morphological variables of competition, blocking and resistance. Qualitatively, Findings show that the selected English and French suffixes are in a morphological competition because they are available to similar lexical bases in each of the two languages. Quantitatively, it was discovered that –ity and –ness in English and -age and     -ment in French are in a comfortable competition where blocking is to some extent resisted. In the final analysis, this paper shows that the concepts of morphological competition and morphological blocking are real and that of morphological resistance, innovatively argued in this paper is equally scientifically sustainable.