LIN376H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Closed Set, Western Romance Languages
Document Summary
Chapter six verb morphology: the present indicative. The romance languages reflect that latin spread to regions where people learned it, untutored. The latin system was partially dismantled and some new systems emerged, which varied across the new languages. Two principles become evident in romance morphological change, chiefly in verb stems. First, there is a perpetual tension between the phonological changes that create allomorphy in the paradigms and the force of analogy that tends to regularize paradigms. Second, regularizing does not always mean that a paradigm ends up with a single invariant stem morpheme rather, paradigms may gravitate by analogy toward some favored pattern of allomorphy. Verbs in romance are divided into conjugation classes, represented by their infinitives. Latin had four conjugation classes: i, ii, iii, iv. The latin infinitives that are rhizotonic (stressed on the root) are only class iii.
