Alignment of forms in Spanish verbal inflection: the gang poner, tener, venir, salir, valer as a window into the nature of paradigmatic analogy and predictability

Borja Herce

doi:10.1007/s11525-020-09352-8

Abstract

The future and conditional forms of venir ‘come’, tener ‘have’ and poner ‘put’ were characterized in Old Spanish by various alternatives (e.g. verné, vendré, verré, venré in the case of come.1SG.FUT) which originated through different sound changes taking place in different varieties. The victory of vendré in contemporary Spanish could be seen simply as an inconsequential resolution of this competition of forms. Here I argue against such an interpretation. I will provide quantitative geographical and diachronic evidence which suggests that the adoption of the variant vendré is related to other apparently unconnected analogical changes (most notably valo>valgo ‘be worth.1SG.PRES.IND’) in the history of the language. These two changes have conspired to align different morphological operations in a way that inflectional predictability is achieved from scratch. This development shows that predictability can be a major force in morphological change even between formally dissimilar morphological units and outside of the usual suspects the ‘morphomes’. The emergence of predictability networks like this one has important implications, touching on vital issues like segmentation, analogical change, the status of No-Blur, among others.

Highlights

This paper starts from the observation that the Spanish verbs venir ‘come’, tener ‘have’, poner ‘put’, salir ‘exit’, and valer ‘be worth’ share various highly idiosyn- B B
Herce cratic inflectional traits: future/conditional stems in -dr, Lmorphome stems in -g, and bare-stem imperatives
This term usually refers to patterns of formal identity within the inflectional paradigm of a lexeme that have to be regarded as arbitrary because they do not correspond to semantic distinctions and are not reducible to phonological context either

Summary

Introduction

This paper starts from the observation that the Spanish verbs venir ‘come’, tener ‘have’, poner ‘put’, salir ‘exit’, and valer ‘be worth’ share various highly idiosyn-. B. Herce cratic inflectional traits: future/conditional stems in -dr- (i.e. vendré, tendré etc.), Lmorphome stems in -g- (i.e. vengo, tengo etc.), and bare-stem imperatives (i.e. ven, ten etc.). Herce cratic inflectional traits: future/conditional stems in -dr- (i.e. vendré, tendré etc.), Lmorphome stems in -g- (i.e. vengo, tengo etc.), and bare-stem imperatives (i.e. ven, ten etc.) These morphological operations are highly lexically restricted and almost unique to these lexical items and their derivates. This small set of verbs, constitutes what has traditionally been referred to as a morphological gang.1 This extraordinary morphological alignment is all the more surprising if one considers that these morphological operations are completely unrelated in terms of both forms and diachronic origin.

Background

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion