Le suffixe -ëi- dans la première conjugaison du badiot

Abstract

The insertion of inflectional suffixes in the verbal paradigm is a widespread phenomenon, characteristic of Romance verbal morphology. Traditionally, there are two types of hypotheses that concern verbal amplifications: on the one hand there is a phonological explanation that relies on the criterion of the “generalization of stress”, on the other hand there is a semantic-functional hypothesis based on the theory of verbal aspect. This contribution proposes an analysis of the suffix -ëi- that appears in the verbal forms with stressed stem in the Badiot dialect, one of the idioms of the central Ladin group. The confrontation of the traditional hypotheses with a corpus of 2040 verbs of the first conjugation of the Badiot dialect, reveals that neither the phonological hypothesis nor the semantic-functional hypothesis can account for the insertion of the suffix. An alternative hypothesis is proposed, wich considers stress in a paradigmatic perspective wich that explains the presence of the suffix by the generalization of the metrical structure associated with the lexical stem of the infinitive.