The paper tries to account for several instances of emerging suppletion by establishing a cross-linguistic tendency of suppletion replication in grammaticalization. It can be shown that words which acquire new grammatical functions and therefore enter a different class of lexemes tend to copy suppletion patterns already present in other members of this class. This development can be triggered by factors of different nature, either internal to the language in question or rooted in contact between different languages or dialects of the same language. The suppletion replication tendency is demonstrated on several cases of grammaticalization of demonstrative or relative pronouns into 3rd person pronouns. This typologically common development is known to have led to the creation of new suppletion in several languages of Europe. In the present paper, three particularly telling cases from Slavonic, dialects of Lithuanian and early West Germanic dialects spoken on the continent are discussed in detail.

Traditionally three independent types of analogical change in inflectional paradigms are distinguished: proportional analogy, paradigmatic leveling and analogical extension. However, the investigation of the data reveals that out of these types only that of proportional analogy can be empirically verified, being supported by clear evidence from languages with well documented history. Moreover, as shown by data from Russian, Old High German dialects, Old Saxon, Old English, and Latin, even in the most secure cases of paradigmatic leveling or analogical extension found in the literature the assumption of proportional analogy is either probable or cannot be excluded. Consequently the three traditional types of analogical change seem to differ with respect to their ontological status. On the one hand, paradigmatic leveling, i.e. the elimination of allomorphy in inflectional paradigms, is to be viewed merely as a motivation for change whose operating principle really is proportional analogy. On the other hand, analogical extension, i.e., the extension of already existing inflection forms through affixes with comparable function, seems to be just a possible way to describe the results of changes which, again, may in fact be instances of proportional analogy. These findings have the following implications for linguistic theory and practice. In practical work on inflectional morphology paradigmatic leveling and analogical extension without the use of proportional analogy can no longer be used in explanations on reconstructed stages of language development. All proposed explanations of this kind are to be supported by establishing an underlying proportional analogy or reconsidered if this is impossible. The proposed distinction between the motivational factors of change, to which paradigmatic leveling may belong, and its operational principle, which always seems to be proportional analogy, leads to a new three-level model of analogical change in inflectional paradigms: On the first level there are the motivational factors, on the second the proportional relations, and on the third level we find the factors governing the choice of a particular proportional relation. Furthermore, it can be shown that a number of morphological processes that have been described recently, such as the spread of the so called ‘superstable inflectional markers’ in nominal paradigms, the ‘externalization of inflection’ in pronouns and ‘product-oriented modifications’ in verbal conjugation, actually operate on the basis of proportional analogy. The widespread belief that assumed ‘superstable markers’ can be transferred from one inflectional type to another without a proportional base is founded on an unnecessary modification of the notion of proportional analogy that can be shown to be highly problematic by adducing empirical evidence. The most prominent instances of ‘superstable marker’ transfer in the North Germanic noun inflection are in fact clearly based on proportional relations between the inflectional patterns involved as soon as the chronology of the development is taken into consideration. It can also be shown that the shape of the ‘externalized’ inflection forms in pronominal paradigms of Old Norse cannot be accounted for by means of analogical extension but that, again, only proportional analogy provides a sufficient explanation for the attested structures. In addition, it can be demonstrated that proportional analogy offers an explanation for a similar development in Georgian. The often-supposed cases of ‘product oriented modifications’ without proportional analogy in the history of English verb inflection can be explained differently with the help of dialectal variation. Hence, they are not a counterargument against the notion of proportional analogy as the only empirically supported operational principle of analogical change in inflectional paradigms, argued for in this paper.

This paper deals with one of the oldest and most controversial problems in the historical morphology of the Germanic branch of Indo-European: the origin and historical development of the so-called ‘weak preterite’. In Germanic, the weak preterite is the only means of forming the preterite tense of a derived verb. In spite of two hundred years of research into the weak preterite and a large number of hypotheses concerning its origin, it is not even securely established how the inflectional endings of this formation should be reconstructed for the common prehistory of the attested Germanic languages. Traditionally the inflectional endings of the weak preterite are conceived of as reflecting free inflectional forms of the verb “do”, only recently having been grammaticalized as inflectional morphology for derived verbs. But it has never been possible to identify the inflectional forms in question satisfactorily within the paradigm of “do”. This paper reconsiders the evidence of the Germanic daughter languages by taking into account West Germanic irregularities previously neglected or viewed as irrelevant. It is shown that the West Germanic evidence provides a key to understanding the origin and the later developments of the weak preterite inflectional endings.

No abstract

As is well known, PIE possessed several distinct sigmatic formations with modal or future-like semantics. The paper deals with two sigmatic formations which must be reconstructed for PIE and obviously possessed a similar semantic value. First: a full grade -si̯e/o-formation which is attested in Indo-Iranian, Continental Celtic and Balto-Slavonic; and second, an athematic -s-formation which is attested in Italic and in the Eastern branch of Baltic. The diverging morphology of these formations implies that they originally also differed in their semantics. The problem is that both formations are reflected as simple future tense in all daughterlanguages which preserved them. However, it seems possible to detect the original semantic difference between these formations by using the evidence of the only IE branch which preserved both formations side by side, i.e. Baltic. The paper investigates the morphology of the sigmatic future tense in dialects of Lithuanian and Latvian and shows that for the common prehistory of East Baltic dialects a secondary conflation of originally independent PIE formations—-si̯e/o-formation and -s-formation—in one single paradigm must be assumed. The particular distribution of both formations within the unified paradigm of Proto-East-Baltic makes it possible to obtain information on the lost semantic difference between them. Possible traces of the -si̯e/o-formation in the only recorded West Baltic language, Old Prussian, seem to confirm the conclusions drawn on the basis of the East Baltic evidence.