Edited by Richard Dury, Maurizio Gotti and Marina Dossena
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 296] 2008
► pp. 217–239
An in-depth corpus study will show that the ability of -able formations to highlight other arguments of the verbal base is present from the start in Old French texts, similarly to findings for Modern French (2003). Old French formations like (par)durable, decevable or changable show that unergatives and unaccusatives can just as well serve as input to -able formations, and that the traditional distinction between transitive and intransitive types cannot account for the variety of derivatives we are already faced with in the Old French period.
We also argue against the assumptions that in Old French the active meaning was clearly dominant and that in ME the free morpheme able explains the rise of the suffix -able. The semantic analysis has shown that an adequate word-formation rule should account for the event structure of the base verb rather than rely on the syntactic or semantic frame alone.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 9 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.