Autonomous Morphology in Diachrony: Comparative Evidence from Romance Languages

The project will provide a general description of the structure of the Romance verb paradigm, but the central research question is the true extent of ‘morphomic’, autonomously morphological, structures in the Romance inflectional system, and their importance in diachronic change in the paradigmatic system. A major issue that identification of Romance autonomous morphological structure promises to illuminate is the possibility that systematic predictability of patterning is as important for speakers, or even more important, than transparent alignment between form and meaning or phonological environment.