French evaluative prefixes in translation: From automatic alignment to semantic categorization

Evaluative morphology (esp. augmentatives and diminutives) has been extensively discussed in the field of morphological typology (see e.g. Stump, 1993; Bauer, 1997; Grandi & Montermini, 2005; Körtvélyessy & Stekauer, 2011). Corpus-based descriptions of evaluative morphology, however, are still sorely lacking for many languages, including French. A first attempt at an exhaustive inventory and general discussion of French evaluative prefixation is found in Fradin & Montermini (2009) (in addition to prefixation, it also deals with the -ET suffixation). One of the important insights offered by Fradin & Montermini’s overview is that in French, like in many other languages, evaluative prefixes can be classified along the following two dimensions (see Wierzbicka, 1991; Grandi, 2002; the sub-categories are taken from Guilbert, 1971: L and Cartoni, 2008: 287291):