What do derivational paradigms tell us about back-formation and what does back-formation tell us about derivational paradigms?

Back-formation is the process that leads to the coinage of a lexeme by deleting a sequence present in the base, such as the verb babysit from the noun babysitter. Back-formed words exhibit a distortion between a meaning that is more complex than that of their base and a form that is simpler. The very nature of this process remains to be established. Our study suggests that back-formation (i) encompasses multiple realities, (ii) performs a formal regularization within paradigms, and (iii) most of the time involves meaning-form discrepancies. Based on five case studies of French verbs that are either back-formed from nouns or adjectives, or have the structure of neoclassical compounds, we propose that these verbs fall into three main groups, depending on the structures they involve. Our analysis highlights the importance of a paradigmatic description where formal and semantic dimensions are distinguished. We also show how a paradigmatic framework such as ParaDis sheds new light on the nature of back-formation. Conversely, back-formation helps us better characterize the structure of paradigmatic families and the relations between newly-created families and existing ones.