Démonette-2, a derivational database for French with broad lexical coverage and fine-grained morphological descriptions

Abstract

Morphological databases play an important role in linguistic research today. While several exist for the study of inflectional morphology in French, there is still a lack of resources for derivational morphology. This article presents Démonette-2, a new release of the French derivational morphology database Démonette. Developed in the context of the Démonext project, this database provides a framework in which it is possible to integrate various existing derivational resources. Démonette is characterized by its relational nature, which makes it possible to describe an extensive set of word formation patterns, including suffixation, prefixation, and a variety of non-canonical derivational processes such as conversion and parasynthetic formations. It reconciles broad coverage and fine-grained descriptions and is suitable for different audiences: morphologists working in different theoretical frameworks, teachers, speech therapists, NLP specialists, etc. The article presents in detail the structure and content of Démonette, its evolution since the first version, and its query interface.