French suffixation in -et and the question of productivity

This article first sketches an analysis of the system of -et suffixation in French. The analysis shows that -et suffixation involves approximately fifteen patterns of lexeme formation organized around two poles (Referent and Speaker pole). Building on this analysis, the article examines the productivity of the derivational suffixes -et and -ette in the French newspaper Liberation in a five year period. Formal tools provided by H. Baayen are used to gauge the degree of productivity of both affixes. Two partial results are worth mentioning: first, -ette's degree of productivity exceeds that of -et; this result supports the idea that these suffixes must not be considered as exponent of one and the same morphological process. Second, not all derivational patterns are productive to the same degree, which means that it is meaningless to speak of the global degree of productivity of -et suffixation, except as the sum of the degrees of productivity obtained for each pattern.