Abstract

AbstractThis chapter offers a contrastive account of the systems of verbal inflection in thirteenth-century Florentine (also known as old Italian) and in the modern language. The old Italian system is characterized, in particular, a) by a high degree of allotropy, that is to say of alternant realizations of the same cell in the paradigm, and b) by the nature of the endings in which we find those which are etymologically to be expected co-existing with the innovations which will in due course yield the modern system. The analysis of the old Italian system thus allows us to investigate the mechanisms and dynamics of morphological change by which one system has given way to the other. Of central importance here is the interaction of the principles of isomorphism and iconicity in determining the eventual outcome of the changing system

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