The semantics of morphological negation: nouns prefixed by non- in French

This paper addresses the semantics of nouns prefixed by non- in French from a construction morphology perspective (Booij 2010; Goldberg 2006; Croft & Cruse 2004). On the basis of a large corpus of data drawn from the TLFi, Frantext and the online press watch engine GlossaNet, I show that these lexemes can have three different readings, which I call ontological, complementary and contrary. I describe the constraints on the base which correspond to each of these interpretations and also demonstrate that each of the three interpretations have a preference for a particular type of base.