Inaudible morphemes in silent morphology: An example of agreement in number and gender in the French language

Orthography and pronunciation in the French language are two categories in complete disparity. This discrepancy is reflected in the fact that when pronouncing French, far fewer phonemes are produced than are represented by graphemes in the written form. The goal of this paper is to present the concept of silent morphology, or inaudible morphemes in French, using examples of agreement in gender and number. For this study, we have built a written corpus of allophone French learners L2 called Didacquis, consisting of 30 written productions (narrative and argumentative texts on topics such as studies, travel, and friendships) by 12 learners at the post-initial (PI) stage based on grammatical profiles that show the developmental pathways of acquisition routes (Bartning & Schlyter, 2004). In this context allophone learners refers to people whose first language is not French. The results are interpreted through the Pienemann’s Processability Theory (1998). The conclusion is that understanding these letters in French is exclusively contextual due to the presence of silent morpheme endings and the phenomenon of homophony.