Property nouns with - ité and - itude : formal alternation and morphopragmatics or the sad-itude of the A ité N

Adjectival nominalisation in French involves a range of suffixes, among them - ité and - itude (e.g. banal ‘banal’ > banalité ‘banality’, ample ‘wide’ > amplitude ‘amplitude’). These suffixes show similarities in terms of their historical development, form, and meaning of the derived nouns. The competition between the two has contributed to the unavailability of - itude in active derivation in favour of - ité suffixation. Only a handful of newly coined - itude nouns have been recorded in dictionaries since the 16th century, compared to hundreds of - ité nouns that have been formed over the same period. However, more recently there has been an explosion of - itude derivations, particularly online. In this article, we examine the various criteria that may affect the selection and distribution of both affixes, aiming to determine the specific properties of each suffix as well as the reasons for the retention of - itude as an active suffix. Our study is based on a corpus of attested data consisting of 2,642 deadjectival nouns from a range of sources.