Morphonette: a morphological network of French

This paper describes in details the first version of Morphonette, a new French morpho-logical resource and a new radically lexeme-based method of morphological analysis. This research is grounded in a paradigmatic conception of derivational morphology where the morphological structure is a structure of the entire lexicon and not one of the individual words it contains. The discovery of this structure relies on a measure of morphological similarity between words, on formal analogy and on the properties of two morphological paradigms: morphological derivational families and morphological derivational series. 1 Paradigmatic derivational morphology The starting points of this research are the fundamental ideas of lexeme-based morphology (Aronoff, 1994): only lexemes are signs (i.e. atomic units); affixes are merely phonologial marks; the construction of the meaning and of the form of a derived word are distinct processes. It is grounded in a conception of derivational morphology where words do not have a morphological structure and where this structure is a level of organization of the lexicon. This organization is based on the semantic, formal and categorical relations that hold between the words memorize