| This thesis deals with the weakening of a morphological process in French, that of verbal prefixation. According to most authors (Brunot 1966, Martin 1971, Buridant 1995), verbal prefixation was very productive in Latin and Old French, where its principal effect was to modify the aspect of the verb. In Modern French, verbal prefixation is marginally productive but no longer has an aspectual effect. Firstly, our study extends our empirical knowledge of the state of verbal prefixation in Old French, in particular for the prefix con-, with the goal of elucidating the factors which led to its demise. We show that two theories of prefixation---Di Sciullo's configurational morphology (1996, 1999) and lexical morphology developed by Siegel 1974, Kiparsky 1982, and Mohanan 1982---are not able to adequately explain the behaviour of the prefix con- in Old French. We then examine the studies of Dufresne, Dupuis, Longtin and Tremblay which approach verbal prefixation in French from a diachronic rather than a synchronic point of view. (Abstract shortened by UMI.). |
