French Pejorative Suffixes

Well, since the thesis is holding most of my attention this week, I thought it would be an appropriate TKT topic to discuss what my thesis is all about. I could just post the entire thing up here (I have it in PDF format, after all), but who wants to read through 119 pages of esoteric French linguistics research? Hell, I wrote it and don’t want to read through all that right now! So I’ll just give a really breif overview of what Jerry covers.

First, you’ve got to understand a morpheme. (And that’s morpheme not morphine.) A morpheme is the smallest unit of language that has meaning or serves a grammatical purpose. So the, in, swim, hat, and watermelon are all examples of morphemes because they each have their own meanings or definitions. However, -ly, -ing, pre-, -s, and anti- are all examples of morphemes as well. Each of these parts has its own meaning and many (if not most) serve a grammatical function. For example, -ly changes a word into an adverb (smart > smartly). Another example is -s which actually has two forms, one for verbs (swim > swims) and one for nouns (cow > cows). In English, these two forms just happen to be homophonous (They sound the same.). But they’re all morphemes. A word like chair has one morpheme, but a word like antidisestablishmentarianism has a buttload (technical term for “a lot” or here, something more like 6). Understanding morphemes is important to understanding affixes, which is the next point.

An affix is a bound morphme (A morpheme that can’t stand on its own like -ing or pro-.) that attaches to a stem morpheme (A morpheme that other morphemes attach to like how swim can have -ing and -s attach to it, although linguists aren’t always consistent in how they use terms like base, stem and root when discussing morphemes.). There are four types of affixes: prefix, circumfix, infix, and suffix (sometimes called postfix).

1. A prefix is a bound morpheme which precedes the stem (e.g., postoperation).
2. A circumfix is a bound morpheme which is placed around the stem, before and behind (English doesn’t have this, but other languages such as German do.).
3. An infix is a bound morpheme that is placed within the stem (English doesn’t technically have these, but an example would be how people insert words like bloody and fucking inside other words like absobloodlylutely and infuckingcredible. Rules on that in another TKT.).
4. And finally, a suffix is a bound morpheme that follows the stem (e.g., careful).

Since French is like English and doesn’t have circumfixes or infixes, we don’t have to worry about those. In fact, since my thesis was specifically on suffixes, we really don’t have to worry about prefixes much either. That said, the third important thing to know is that even though suffixes are bound morphemes and can’t stand on their own like book or government can, they still have meanings. Most suffixes have grammatical meaning only, which is to say that they mark things to show grammatical use, such as marking verbs for person or tense (see TKT #3 for more on “person” as it is used here) or they can change a word’s class like from adjective to adverb, noun to adjective, or noun to verb, and so on. There are affixes, however, which don’t just mark a word for grammatical function; many affixes carry their own meanings. Classic examples of this exist in prefixes. Prefixes such as in- (and its variants il-, im-, and ir-) and non- carry negative meanings and can be glossed as “not.” Illegal = “not” legal. Nonresponsive = “not” responsive. Prefixes are much more likely to change a word’s meaning than a suffix, especially in English. French affixes aren’t much different from English’s affix types and usage, since the languages are so closely related (another TKT topic). However, French has some unusal suffixes, which is where my thesis begins.

In French, there are suffixes which give not only grammatical meaning (noun to adjective, noun to verb, etc.) but also lexical meaning (i.e., changed the stem’s meaning). More than that, the meaning that these suffixes give to their stems is insulting. Essentially, you take a word, attach one of these insulting (pejorative, invective, derogatory, etc.) suffixes to it, and now it’s an insult. Well, mostly. As I came to find in my research, what a lot of people were calling a “pejorative suffix” was really just a slang suffix or the stem itself was already an insult. If I take a word like bitch, add an insulting suffix to it, and start calling people that, is it really any more insulting? It was already an insult! Many suffixes which I came across were just slang or common suffixes where a handful of more prominent words with that ending were insulting. Some of the “suffixes” people cited weren’t suffixes at all but the result of compounding, combining two whole words together to make a new word (e.g. bird + house = birdhouse). Some “suffixes” weren’t suffixes at all, and there was no further proof to bother classifying them as such. Some suffixes had evidence that they were once used pejoratively, but that may have been hundreds of years ago and they’re no longer commonly associated with insults. There’s also the matter of how insulting a given suffix is. Is it really insulting, or is it really just a way of saying “not” like many prefixes do? Now can you see why it took 119 pages to do all this?

There was one suffix which stood out from all the rest, however. The suffix -asse is consistently used pejoratively and is prominent in some of the more harsh insults. While there are words in French with this suffix that aren’t invective (e.g. mulasse “young mule” and barcasse “large boat”), by and large, when a French person runs across a word with this suffix, they are very likely to assume it means something like “bad” + stem. So if you made up a word, such as crayonasse from the word crayon “pencil,” a native speaker of French would likely understand this to mean “bad pencil, a pencil of poor quality.” Not only does -asse often mean “bad,” it also makes words feminine. That doesn’t mean it makes them dainty or girly; feminine is a grammatical function in languages which have grammatical genders like French (masculine and feminine) and German (masculine, feminine, and neuter). So it doesn’t necessarily mean that adding -asse to a word makes it apply to women only, but technically it can be used for that purpose. To date, I have found only one word which ends in -asse that is masculine, and oddly, it’s arcagnasses or argagnasses “menstrual cycle.” Otherwise, it’s pretty safe to say that -asse marks a word as both feminine and insulting. On words that are already pejorative before attaching -asse, such as conasse “bitch” from con “asshole, jerk (cf. English cunt)”, it’s just icing on the cake. But for neutral words like homme “man,” adding -asse makes it an insult: hommasse “mannish woman.”

So there you have it. This is what I’ve devoted a hefty chunk of my life to, and with some help from my future collegues in LLL, I’ll likely take parts of this research and turn it into articles which I’ll send to various journals for publication. Future plans for this topic include doing more dictionary mining as well as surveys of native French speakers to try and develop a more accurate continuum of French pejorative suffixes. For now, however, I just want to get the damned thing sent off to the Grad School where they’ll take care of binding and whatnots.

As usual, if there’s something you want to see explained in TKT, feel free to post it either here in the comments or on the TKT page itself, where I have listed future topics as well as links to previous ones. Enjoy your Thursday! Erinasse, signing off.