Abstract
This paper provides an overview of the morphological and phonological properties of nouns from which French adjectives are derived. Two questions arise with respect to the data.
First, is the relation between an adjective and its base independent of previous morphological processes? Second, how is the derivation history reflected in subsequent derivation? Three situations with complex suffixed base nouns-deadjectival, deverbal and denominal nouns are investigated in detail. We show that the attractiveness of some suffixal combinations together with the semantic type of the base play a central role in multiple derivation.
Therefore, we argue that the derivation history impacts on the possibility of adjectival derivation insofar as it constrains the semantic and morphophonological properties of base nouns.