{"id":1805,"date":"2023-06-28T17:24:29","date_gmt":"2023-06-28T21:24:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=1805"},"modified":"2023-06-28T17:24:29","modified_gmt":"2023-06-28T21:24:29","slug":"defectivity-in-french","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/defectivity-in-french\/","title":{"rendered":"Defectivity in French"},"content":{"rendered":"

[This is part of a series of\u00a0defectivity case studies<\/a>.]<\/p>\n

Morin (1987:33f.), cited in Boy\u00e9 & Cabredo Hofherr (2010), draws attention to the French verb frire\u00a0<\/em>‘to fry’. It is unobjectionable in the present active singular\u2014je fris<\/em>, tu<\/em> fris<\/em>, il frit<\/em>\u2014but apparently defective in the plural; according to my informants, speakers paraphrase this using inflected forms of faire frire<\/em> ‘to make fried’. <\/em>Arriv\u00e9 (1987), also cited by Boy\u00e9 & Cabredo Hofherr, lists frire <\/em>and about a dozen other verbs as defective; according to my informants, all are rare, archaic, or unfamiliar.<\/p>\n

Consider the case of\u00a0frire\u00a0<\/em>briefly. It has an obvious analogical model:\u00a0rire\u00a0<\/em>‘to laugh’, which suggests *nous frions<\/em> ‘we fry’, and so on. One obvious possibility is that this is somehow in competition with *nous frissons<\/i><\/em> (cf. je finis<\/em>\/nous\u00a0fin<\/span><\/em>issons<\/em> ‘I\/we finish’ and most 2nd conjugation verbs), <\/span>which would give rise to a weird homophony with the plural of frisson<\/em> ‘shiver; excitement’.1<\/sup><\/p>\n

Endnotes<\/h1>\n
    \n
  1. Here the ss <\/em>appearing in the plural is ultimately descended from the Latin inchoative infix -sc-<\/em> as seen in, e.g.,\u00a0nasc\u014d <\/em>‘I am born’. Neat, right?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    References<\/h1>\n

    Arriv\u00e9, M. 1997. La conjugaison pour tou<\/em>s. Hatier.
    \nBoy\u00e9, G., and Cabredo Hofherr, P. 2010. Defectivity as stem suppletion in French and Spanish verbs. In Defective Paradigms: Missing Forms and What They Tell Us<\/em>, ed. M. Baerman, G. G. Corbett, and D. Brown, 35\u201352. Oxford University Press.
    \nMorin, Y.-C. 1987. Remarques sur l\u2019organisation de la flexion des verbes fran\u00e7ais. ITL Review of Applied Linguistics<\/em> 77-78: 13-91.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    [This is part of a series of\u00a0defectivity case studies.] Morin (1987:33f.), cited in Boy\u00e9 & Cabredo Hofherr (2010), draws attention to the French verb frire\u00a0‘to fry’. It is unobjectionable in the present active singular\u2014je fris, tu fris, il frit\u2014but apparently defective in the plural; according to my informants, speakers paraphrase this using inflected forms of … Continue reading “Defectivity in French”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[28,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-defectivity","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1805"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1807,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1805\/revisions\/1807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}