Summary: | The paper reviews the prefix re- as it appears in the French language today. As a widely recurrent morpheme with a significance that sometimes completely separates the verb from its base and other times seems almost indiscernible, its properties can be hard to grasp for the non-native learner. While focusing on verbs that lack the common meaning of iteration that the prefix re- usually entails, the paper identifies thirteen lexical definitions of prefixed verbs that reference the base verb as synonymous. Of these thirteen instances, the paper attempts to distinguish the different qualities of the two verb pairs sentir and ressentir, and emplir and remplir respectively, by conducting a series of pragmatic researches. It arrives to the conclusion that the prefix re- presents a difference, if not in sense then in register or actuality, largely dependent of its context. However, said difference is sometimes so subtle that certain contexts allow for the use of either verb.
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