From pure phonology to pure morphology the reshaping of the romance verb

Abstract

This study deals with a significant morphological difference between Latin and Romance, namely that the latter has pervasive patterns of root-allomorphy absent from the former. Of particular interest here is the emergence of such allomorphy correlated with arbitrarily intersecting parameters of person, number, tense and mood in the verb. The alternations in question are, initially, the predictable consequences of regular sound changes. I argue that the phonological causation of this allomorphy is rapidly lost, and that the paradigmatic distribution of the resultant alternations is ‘morphomic’ in the sense of Aronoff (1994), lacking both phonological and morphosyntactic conditioning. These patterns provide an abstract paradigmatic template for wide-ranging and formally heterogeneous subsequent morphological changes across the Romance languages. But many scholars seek to analyse the resultant alternations in synchronically phonological terms, and some of the arguments adduced are powerful. This study reviews attempts to analyse in terms of phonological conditioning what I believe to be ‘morphomic’ alternations. While I defend the ‘morphomicity’ of the phenomena at issue, I also admit that the boundary between ‘morphomic’ and phonological phenomena may be less sharp than has usually been recognized.