Derivational paradigm – Is there any? A contrastive research

3. Empirical research 
The research presented here analyses three languages: English, French and Slovak. The aim 
of the research is to find out if a fully regular morphological paradigm can be ascertained in 
derivational morphology and to examine and compare the degree of its regularity in different 
languages. The choice of lexemes selected from randomly conceptual categories was likewise 
arbitrary. 
For nouns, the conceptual field of ‘family members’ is chosen and the following non
-
derived words were listed: 
mother, father, daughter, son, cousin (male, female), aunt, uncle, 
groom, bride, sister, brother, husband, partner, nephew, niece, widow, parent, child 
and
 
fiancé
. For adjectives, the following words were collected to represent the conceptual 
category of ‘size and shape’: 
fat, tall, hard, deep, oval, big, small, round, narrow, slim, 
square, sharp, solid, light, dense, long, giant, thin, tiny 
and
short
. The last conceptual 
category is th
at of ‘verbs of motion’. The following entries were
listed: 
to rotate, to walk, to 
fly, to jump, to escape, to dive, to slide, to roll, to swing, to dance, to swim, to travel, to jog, 
to fall, to climb, to ride, to drive, to descend, to ascend 
and
 to ski.
These conceptual fields represent three conceptual categories, in particular, 
SUBSTANCE
,
QUALITY
and 
ACTION
, and, at the same time, three different word-classes. Each 
of them includes 20 simple, underived words as a point of departure for the paradigm 
development. For each category, all the derived words, which are semantically related to the 
base word were identified and listed.
For the purposes of the current paper, the scope of the research was extended by 
encompassing potential words as well. I tak
e Bauer’s conception, that word
-formation 
paradigms are based on the potential of filling in the existing paradigmatic gaps (1997: 253), 
as a starting point. This potentiality is, therefore, a crucial term for the concept of derivational 
paradigm, with availability of slots being one of its central features. It follows that the data 
were collected not only from printed sources, but also from the Internet as well. The Internet 

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is full of nonce-words and neologisms that would be, were it not for the Internet, considered 
as non-existing (i.e. potential words). Some of these non-existing words would surely have 
got lost throughout the time needed for their inclusion into printed dictionaries or reference 
books. Likewise, even if they were preserved in a language, at the time of carrying out the 
research, they would be treated as non-existing.
What should be said is that if potential words were not taken into account and the 
research allowed for actual words only, the picture of derivational paradigms would be 
completely different. This paper does not discuss the completeness of the respective 
derivational paradigms, nor does it discuss the role of individual word-formation processes in 
developing paradigms. As a result, any broader generalizations based on these results should 
be avoided. 
 
3.1. Slovak 
 
3.1.1. De-substantival derivation