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In:The Ziggurat of Grammar: In honor of Ur Shlonsky
Edited by Lena Baunaz, Giuliano Bocci and Andrew Nevins
[Language Faculty and Beyond 20] 2025
► pp. 56–78

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Chapter 4
The French suffix –el /–al

 | LLING, Nantes Université
 | LLF, Université Paris Cité
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 13 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.20.04fat
Abstract
All Romance languages but French display a unique reflex of the Latin suffix –alis. French has two, –el and –al (formel vs. normal). The standard opinion is that –el is popular and –al learned. On that view, it is accidental that no other Romance language developed a comparable system of dual exponence as a modern version of –alis. The analysis offered here addresses this question by directly tying the presence of those two different versions with properties of the phonological system of French not encountered elsewhere in Romance. It is argued that surface [–el] and [–al] realize in free variation an underlying, underspecified, unheaded schwa. A peripheral (and more general) thesis inherent in our description of the relationship between –el and –al is that duration is only parametrically associated to the realization of branching vowels. In some, perhaps most, languages, the pronunciation of branching vowels, stressed or otherwise, is redundantly associated with duration. In French, we claim, duration is assigned to stressed branching vowels, exclusively.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The consensus
  • 3.One suffix or two?
  • 4.The terms of the discussion revisited
  • 5.A representational framework
  • 6.Deriving the neutralization of the difference between –el and –al
  • 7.Length, branching, duration
  • 8.Free variation, usage, etc.
  • 9.The case of –ain [ɛ̃] and –an [ã]
  • 10.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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