Morphome death and transfiguration in the history of French

Abstract

Maiden (e.g. 2009a) shows that treating the paradigmatic distribution of root allomorphy in Romance verbs as morphomic, in the sense of Aronoff (1994), provides a coherent explanation for the diachronic behaviour of such allomorphy. The major templates for distribution (‘metamorphomes’, Round 2015) shared by most Romance varieties are also found in early French, but are not well represented in the modern language, which has developed new metamorphomes. By charting the diachronic development of metamorphomes in French, this study investigates the processes responsible for change to such templates. Overall, the French data point to segmental sound change as the central factor in change to metamorphomes: segmental sound change modifies the observable paradigmatic distribution of allomorphs, reducing the number of lexemes in which an existing metamorphomic template could be deduced, and increasing the number of lexemes across which a novel metamorphomic generalisation can be made. The loss of existing metamorphomes, and the rise of new ones, can be considered a single process, of metamorphomic templates changing shape as further paradigm cells attach to or defect from them. This process must be distinguished from changes in metamorphome shape due to the creation or elimination of paradigm categories for independent morphosyntactic reasons.

Paradigmatic restructuring and the diachrony of stem alternations in Chichimec

“…We take the cells occupied by distinct stems as forming fixed configurations, which speakers can manipulate. Our approach is consistent with existing literature on the concept of the 'morphome', in the sense of Aronoff 1994 andMaiden 2005 (also referred to as 'metamorphomes' by Round 2015 andEsher 2016), where systematic patterns of stem alternations in inflectional paradigms-which we can conceptualize as 'stem zones' (i.e. abstract subsets of cells) of a paradigm occupied by nondefault stems 4 -cannot be explained by appealing to any other level of grammar, such as syntax, semantics, or phonology, but instead have to be accepted as purely morphological in nature.…”

“…It is worth noting here that similar diachronic changes at the level of the morphome have been documented in other languages, most notably in Romance (see Esher 2016 andMaiden 2018, among others), so the changes we see in Chichimec are by no means unexpected. Maiden (2018:284) states that 'existing patterns may become subject to systematic disruptions in their distribution that, strikingly, leave them still morphomic, but with a changed paradigmatic domain', and this is precisely what we see happening in Chichimec.…”

“…Some of the changes documented in the literature on Romance morphomes are similar in nature, if not direct parallels, to what we find in Chichimec, suggesting that morphomes display similar diachronic pathways crosslinguistically. Smith (2011) and Esher (2016) talk of 'morphome death', which implies that the morphome has been lost from the language. Note that we use the term 'loss' ( §7.1) to refer to an individual verb ceasing to exhibit a given morphome, and so these two terms are used to refer to distinct processes.…”

“…We adopt Maiden's (2018:289) notions of 'contraction' and 'expansion' ( §7.5) as they neatly describe what we observe in Chichimec, while our concept of 'cooption of a stem' ( §7.4) appears to have the same end result as Maiden's notion of 'coalescence'. In recognizing that morphomic changes often result in a morphome changing its shape while retaining its morphomic nature, Esher (2016) employs the catch-all term 'morphome transfiguration'.…”

Morphological autonomy and the long-term vitality of morphomes: stem-final consonant loss in Romance verbs and paradigmatic analogy

“…While some research suggests that sound-change-generated alternations might be less sensitive to morphomic structure than morphological changes (see e.g. Esher, 2017, or Maiden, 2018b, who tends to talk about the sensitivity to morphomes of 'morphological change'), clear cases exist of sound changes being sensitive to paradigmatic structure (see e.g. Malkiel, 1960;Maiden, 2018b:277-283, Herce, forthcoming).…”