The morphological evolution of infinitive, future and conditional forms in Occitan
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Louise Esher
Abstract
In this study I investigate the extent to which the formal identity of infinitive, future stem and conditional stem persists in a number of varieties of Occitan, a Gallo-Romance language spoken in southern France, and the consequences of these developments for diachronic morphology, in particular the concept of ‘morphome’ (Aronoff 1994) – a systematic formal regularity which is not simply due to sound change and which has no unique functional correlate. Maiden (2005) shows that, despite significant functional divergence, Romance forms deriving from Latin perfectives consistently preserve and may even reinforce the formal identity of their stem, which now constitutes a morphome. The development of Romance synthetic future and conditional forms, deriving from Latin periphrastic constructions infinitive + habeo “I have” and infinitive + habebam “had” respectively, offers a parallel inasmuch as the initial formal identity between the stems of the future and conditional is maintained, while functional commonality between future and conditional has largely been lost. The set of future and conditional cells now appears to constitute a distribution which has psychological reality for speakers. However, it cannot be considered unproblematically morphomic: at a functional level the semantic value of futurity is argued to be common to future and conditional, while at the formal level certain varieties of Occitan present cases of ‘asymmetry’, in which the identity between the future and conditional stems is broken. Taken together, the existence of asymmetry and possible functional commonality invite a view of morphomic phenomena which admits of interaction between the autonomously morphological and the functional.
Abstract
In this study I investigate the extent to which the formal identity of infinitive, future stem and conditional stem persists in a number of varieties of Occitan, a Gallo-Romance language spoken in southern France, and the consequences of these developments for diachronic morphology, in particular the concept of ‘morphome’ (Aronoff 1994) – a systematic formal regularity which is not simply due to sound change and which has no unique functional correlate. Maiden (2005) shows that, despite significant functional divergence, Romance forms deriving from Latin perfectives consistently preserve and may even reinforce the formal identity of their stem, which now constitutes a morphome. The development of Romance synthetic future and conditional forms, deriving from Latin periphrastic constructions infinitive + habeo “I have” and infinitive + habebam “had” respectively, offers a parallel inasmuch as the initial formal identity between the stems of the future and conditional is maintained, while functional commonality between future and conditional has largely been lost. The set of future and conditional cells now appears to constitute a distribution which has psychological reality for speakers. However, it cannot be considered unproblematically morphomic: at a functional level the semantic value of futurity is argued to be common to future and conditional, while at the formal level certain varieties of Occitan present cases of ‘asymmetry’, in which the identity between the future and conditional stems is broken. Taken together, the existence of asymmetry and possible functional commonality invite a view of morphomic phenomena which admits of interaction between the autonomously morphological and the functional.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Foreword & Acknowledgements vii
- Editors’ introduction ix
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Part I. General and specific issues of language change
- Competing reinforcements 3
- On the reconstruction of experiential constructions in (Late) Proto-Indo-European 31
- Criteria for differentiating inherent and contact-induced changes in language reconstruction 49
- Misparsing and syntactic reanalysis 69
- How different is prototype change? 89
- The syntactic reconstruction of alignment and word order 107
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Part II. Linguistic variation and change in Germanic
- The Dutch-Afrikaans participial prefix ge- 131
- Diachronic changes in long-distance dependencies 155
- Changes in the use of the Frisian quantifiers ea/oait “ever” between 1250 and 1800 171
- On the development of the perfect (participle) 191
- OV and V-to-I in the history of Swedish 211
- Ethnicity as an independent factor of language variation across space 231
- The sociolinguistics of spelling 253
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Part III. Linguistic variation and change in Greek
- Dative loss and its replacement in the history of Greek 277
- Word order variation in New Testament Greek wh-questions 293
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Part IV. Linguistic change in Romance
- The morphological evolution of infinitive, future and conditional forms in Occitan 317
- The evolution of the encoding of direction in the history of French 333
- Velle -type prohibitions in Latin 355
- The use and development of habere + infinitive in Latin 373
- Index 399
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Foreword & Acknowledgements vii
- Editors’ introduction ix
-
Part I. General and specific issues of language change
- Competing reinforcements 3
- On the reconstruction of experiential constructions in (Late) Proto-Indo-European 31
- Criteria for differentiating inherent and contact-induced changes in language reconstruction 49
- Misparsing and syntactic reanalysis 69
- How different is prototype change? 89
- The syntactic reconstruction of alignment and word order 107
-
Part II. Linguistic variation and change in Germanic
- The Dutch-Afrikaans participial prefix ge- 131
- Diachronic changes in long-distance dependencies 155
- Changes in the use of the Frisian quantifiers ea/oait “ever” between 1250 and 1800 171
- On the development of the perfect (participle) 191
- OV and V-to-I in the history of Swedish 211
- Ethnicity as an independent factor of language variation across space 231
- The sociolinguistics of spelling 253
-
Part III. Linguistic variation and change in Greek
- Dative loss and its replacement in the history of Greek 277
- Word order variation in New Testament Greek wh-questions 293
-
Part IV. Linguistic change in Romance
- The morphological evolution of infinitive, future and conditional forms in Occitan 317
- The evolution of the encoding of direction in the history of French 333
- Velle -type prohibitions in Latin 355
- The use and development of habere + infinitive in Latin 373
- Index 399
