The influence of prescriptivism on French verbal defectiveness

Abstract Words that speakers and dictionaries deem to be morphologically defective (and thus unacceptable) are often found in corpora, suggesting a disconnect between judgements about such words and usage of them. This paper explores the hypothesis that social and contextual factors may help explain why defective words are often attested despite speakers’ intuitions that they should not be. We carry out a study on French, proposing that some verbs conventionally analysed as defective in this language are not so much examples of ineffable ungrammaticality as they are examples of social stigmatisation. We perform an acceptability judgement task which finds that the acceptability of defective words is inversely correlated with the extent to which participants orient to prescriptivist discourses circulating in French society, and depends also on the emphasis that the task places on taking a prescriptive attitude to language. The hypothesis that speakers’ metalinguistic awareness is key to accounting for speakers’ felt sense of defectiveness is further substantiated by the fact that acceptability of defective items is inversely proportional to the frequency of their lexeme, suggesting that the amount of evidence speakers have about a lexeme plays an important role in how acceptable the item is perceived to be.