English–French contrasts in word-formation. Morphological patterns and stylistic effects

Starting from the observation that word-formation has received renewed attention in linguistics but remains marginal in the field of contrastive linguistics, the aim of this article is twofold: (a) to provide an overview and a reassessment of outstanding contrasts between English and French in lexical morphology: the productivity of compounding and conversion in English; the existence of and the constraints on conversion in French; the place of Romance and neo-classical compounds; the development of N+N compounds in contemporary French; (b) to show that basic morpho-syntactic differences in lexical structure are ultimately responsible for some of the semantic and stylistic effects observed in translation studies, with special attention to the link between compounds and metonymy in English and their translatability into French.