A study on the semantics of the French Prefixes 'Demi-' and 'Semi-'

Abstract

In French, various prefixes can be used to express the notion of 'half or 'middle'. This study aims to describe and compare the semantic features of demi- and semi-, which are generally regarded as synonyms. The two prefixes share the following common meanings: half of concrete subjects in physical terms, incompleteness or imperfection of status or degree and nearly being a certain concept or value. This paper illustrates how these three types of semantic effects of the prefixes are classified in more detail and how they are described in literature texts which are being studied as a corpus. This study extracted examples of sentences with derivatives including demi- and semi- from texts registered in Frantext in the 21st Century and composed a corpus. Furthermore, based on the study results, whether demi- and semi-may replace each other in modern literature texts was reviewed, taking into account the semantic effects which are shared or not shared by the two prefixes. © 2016 International Information Institute.