ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses theoretical way at how a word may modify its morphology. It considers the different categories of word in French. Inflectional morphemes are a rather different kettle of fish from the derivational morphemes. In French, derivational affixes may occur both as prefixes and as suffixes, but inflectional affixes can only occur as suffixes. The terminology used in phonology, linguists has labelled the underlying or abstract representation the morpheme and its corresponding concrete realisation the morph, on a par with the 'phoneme' and the 'phone'. Allomorphs, just like allophones, are found in two types of distributional patterns: complementary distribution and free variation. Traditional accounts of word-class divisions rely heavily on word meanings to decide which category a word belongs to. Thus: noun, verb, adjectives and preposition. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how words in French have their morphology modified according to the different grammatical features which are loaded on to them.
