Can suffixes serve as conceptual relation patterns?

Abstract This article looks at the possibility of using morphemes, in this case suffixes in relational adjectives, as markers of conceptual relations. Noun phrases with relational adjectives involve a head noun, an adjective derived from a noun, and a suffix. Following the hypothesis of constructional morphology, we can assume that the suffix will help define the interpretation of the relationship between these two nouns, which is one of the roles of conceptual relation patterns. The functioning of six French suffixes, considered to be the most widely used in the language, is studied in six corpora belonging to several domains and textual genres. The possibility of these suffixes to mark meronymy is examined; annotation of selected adjectives is carried out for all six corpora. The results are then examined from two points of view: one which concerns the role of domain and textual genre in this marking, the other which studies the link between the possibility for a suffix to mark meronymy and the number of non-ambiguous lexico-syntactic meronymic markers present in the corpus. The results of these two studies show that, of the 6 suffixes studied, -ique is the most semantically stable.