A Reconsideration and Elaboration of a Previously Proposed Hypothesis for the Origin of the —y of Spanish soy, doy, voy, estoy

Abstract

Abstract The origin of –y of Sp. soy, doy, voy, estoy remains unresolved to date. The present study reconsiders and elaborates the ‘post-verbal yo hypothesis’, originally proposed by Ford (1911), which has been rejected by most scholars because they have misunderstood it to suggest that the post-verbal subject pronoun yo became atonic and agglutinated to the verb, subsequently reducing to –y. It is suggested here that the phenomenon of ‘leftward palatal spreading’ from the post-verbal subject pronoun yo, with no agglutination nor reduction in form, first produced phonetic variants, e.g., so yo > ['soi̯-'yo], which were later morphologized and raised to allomorphic status before becoming full-fledged morphological variants upon extraction from the new syntagms, e.g., soy yo > soy (yo) > soy.