Morphome death and transfiguration in the history of French

Abstract

Maiden (e.g. 2009a) shows that treating the paradigmatic distribution of root allomorphy in Romance verbs as morphomic, in the sense of Aronoff (1994), provides a coherent explanation for the diachronic behaviour of such allomorphy. The major templates for distribution (‘metamorphomes’, Round 2015) shared by most Romance varieties are also found in early French, but are not well represented in the modern language, which has developed new metamorphomes. By charting the diachronic development of metamorphomes in French, this study investigates the processes responsible for change to such templates. Overall, the French data point to segmental sound change as the central factor in change to metamorphomes: segmental sound change modifies the observable paradigmatic distribution of allomorphs, reducing the number of lexemes in which an existing metamorphomic template could be deduced, and increasing the number of lexemes across which a novel metamorphomic generalisation can be made. The loss of existing metamorphomes, and the rise of new ones, can be considered a single process, of metamorphomic templates changing shape as further paradigm cells attach to or defect from them. This process must be distinguished from changes in metamorphome shape due to the creation or elimination of paradigm categories for independent morphosyntactic reasons.