Abstract
Although the most familiar examples of autonomously morphological phenomena are entirely arbitrary, Aronoff’s original (1994) proposal predicts that autonomous morphology is not limited to such cases, but is active in all mappings between phonology and morphosyntax, from morphological phenomena considered entirely arbitrary, to morphological phenomena which are to some degree correlated with extramorphological features. In this study I discuss evidence from Romance verb morphology for the existence of such a continuum, and explore approaches to situating morphological phenomena along it, from the starting point of the ‘hierarchy of functional coherence’ (a ranking of morphomes according to the degree to which they correspond to extramorphological criteria) put forward by Smith (2013). I suggest that it is worthwhile to distinguish between the phonological, morphosyntactic and morphosemantic coherence of a given morphome, firstly because these are qualitatively different phenomena, and secondly because phonological correlates appear to make a greater contribution to diachronic resilience.
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Notes
Round’s terminology usefully distinguishes between different types of morphomic phenomena while recalling their common status as morphomic. ‘Metamorphome’ refers to a set of cells within the inflectional paradigm, serving as a template for the paradigmatic distribution of roots, stems, and other inflectional material. ‘Rhizomorphome’ refers to an inflectional class, i.e. set of lexemes which share inflectional realisations (Aronoff 1994:64). This study focuses on metamorphomes.
Acronym from the Spanish expression perfecto y tiempos afines ‘perfect and related tenses’ used to refer to the continuants of Latin perfectives. It is not only legitimate but beneficial to give metamorphomes abstract labels, to allow discussion of formal distributions independently of associated functional content.
Cf. ‘Humboldt’s Universal’, the general claim that language change tends towards biunique relationships between form and function. Within the framework of Natural Morphology, Wurzel (1987:92) similarly posits a universal principle of ‘Uniformity and Transparency’ favouring biunique relationships between form and function in the specific case of inflectional morphology.
Abstract label referring to the shape of the pattern, which, in the traditional presentation of Romance verb paradigms, may be taken to resemble an inverted letter L. Note that Maiden’s own work refers to the L-pattern as a ‘morphome’ rather than ‘metamorphome’ (though in Round’s typology the L-pattern is an example of the latter).
Note that the alternation between 〈c〉 and 〈z〉 in these and other forms is purely allographic.
The past participle itself participates in the expression of the rather different notions ‘perfective’ and ‘passive’ (see Maiden 2013b:504–506 for discussion), although strictly speaking these meanings are associated with the periphrases haber ‘have’ + past participle and ser ‘be’ + past participle respectively, rather than with the participle in isolation.
From the lexeme fuèc ‘fire’ in eastern varieties of Occitan, a near-acronym for the Occitan names of this metamorphome’s constituent screeves, fu tur e c ondicional ‘future and conditional’.
It is possible that the identification of a category ‘perfective aspect’ in Latin may proceed more from observation of formal similarity than from common functional content (Martin Maiden (p.c.); see also Maiden 2013b:493), as in the example of the Castilian ‘imperfect indicative’ discussed by O’Neill (2013). Independently of this issue, the ‘perfect participle’, which might be assumed to share the value of perfectivity, presents not the perfectum stem, but the ‘third stem’ (so termed by Aronoff, 1994). Thus, even if perfectivity is a coherent semantic category, the forms presenting the perfectum stem do not constitute a unique natural class of perfectives.
The term ‘weakly morphomic phenomena’ used by Esher (2013) is misleading, as it suggests that such distributions are not wholly morphomic. This term is a case of overly narrow interpretation of ‘morphomic’.
The L-pattern elsewhere in Romance consists of the 1sg.prs.ind form and all prs.sbjv forms (as in the Castilian example in Table 1). The U-pattern elsewhere in Romance consists of 1sg.prs.ind, 3pl.prs.ind and all prs.sbjv forms. References to the ‘L-pattern’ and ‘U-pattern’ in this section concern the Daco-Romance variants.
〈ă〉 = [ə]; 〈â〉 = [ɨ]; 〈a〉 = [a].
The abstract labels SF and SC are introduced as a means to refer to morphological forms independently of the functions associated with them.
Detailed exemplification and discussion of the French and Occitan data fall outside the scope of this article. The interested reader is referred to the studies cited.
Note that Smith’s paper refers to the standard Romance L-pattern (1sg.prs.ind and all prs.sbjv cells) and U-pattern (L-pattern cells plus 3pl.prs.ind). The Daco-Romance variants discussed in Sect. 3.1 above are not included in Smith’s hierarchy.
Correspondingly, one might consider that there are two ‘imperfect subjunctive’ screeves in Spanish. There are clearly two formally distinct, morphologically identifiable sets of forms, the -ra series (reflexes of the Latin pluperfect indicative) and the -se series (reflexes of the Latin pluperfect subjunctive); however, functional distinctions between the two are minimal (see e.g. DeMello 1993). Lunn (1995:437) makes the interesting observation that the value ‘pluperfect indicative’ which can still be expressed by the -ra form has been spread to the -se form.
I am deeply grateful to Grev Corbett for clarifying my thinking on the relationship between morphosyntactic and morphosemantic features in the Romance data discussed here.
The examples are 3sg word-forms of the first-conjugation cantar ‘sing’, but this choice of example should not be considered of theoretical significance; any consistent person/number value for any given lexeme of any conjugational class would illustrate the same point equally well.
As before, the 3sg forms of cantar ‘sing’ are given purely for illustrative purposes, to represent the screeves involved. The use of these forms should not be taken to imply any theoretical claim about what labels (if any) speakers use for screeves, or about the status of 3sg forms within the paradigm.
Compare the discussion of the N-pattern in the Rhaeto-Romance variety Surmiran (Anderson 2008, 2011, 2013; Maiden, 2011c). In Surmiran, the domains of rhizotonic stress and N-pattern distinctive alternants are exactly coextensive, with the result that neither a morphological account nor a phonological account can be preferred to the exclusion of the other.
The distinctive root was also conserved in the rhizotonic forms of the (now defunct) reflex of the Latin pluperfect indicative (Maiden 2000).
In terms of the extramorphological properties associated with the cells.
An illustrative example: for Romance, one might assume (cf. Sect. 4.1 above) the morphosyntactic feature set {ind, sbjv, sg, pl, pers1, pers2, pers3}. In this system, the cells comprising the Ibero-Romance L-pattern would be defined as {1.sg.ind, 1.sg.sbjv, 2.sg.sbjv, 3.sg.sbjv, 1.pl.sbjv, 2.pl.sbjv, 3.pl.sbjv}. There are 21 possible pairs of cells within this morphome: 6 pairings of 1.sg.ind with each of the sbjv cells, and 15 pairings of each sbjv cell with each other sbjv cell. Similarity between the pair 1.sg.ind and 1.sg.sbjv is 66.7 % (3sig.fig.), since they share two out of three possible features, while similarity between 1.sg.ind and 2.sg.sbjv is 33.3 % (one shared feature), and similarity between 1.sg.ind and 3.pl.sbjv is 0 % (no shared features). Of the 21 possible pairings, 10 have 66.7 % similarity, 9 have 33.3 % similarity, and 2 have 0 % similarity; the mean similarity of cells within this metamorphome is 46.0 %.
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Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the conferences ICHL 21 (Oslo, 8 August 2013) and Morphology and its Interfaces (Lille, 13 September 2013); here, as on those occasions, unpublished data from the ALLOc (Ravier 1971–93) are reproduced by kind permission of the research group CLLE-ERSS (UMR 5263) at the University of Toulouse. The ideas set out here have benefited substantially from the comments of Xavièr Bach, Grev Corbett, Martin Maiden, J.C. Smith and two anonymous reviewers, none of whom should be considered to have any part in remaining errors or shortcomings of the study. Part of this work was conducted during a research fellowship generously funded by St John’s College, Oxford.
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Esher, L. Autonomous morphology and extramorphological coherence. Morphology 24, 325–350 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-014-9246-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-014-9246-8