Partner organizations (inside or outside Oxford): not specified
Project Description:
The Romance verb reveals some seemingly nonsensical, but diachronically and geographically recurrent, patterns in its paradigmatic structure, which show remarkable diachronic robustness, self-reinforcement and self-replication. The recurrent but autonomously morphological structures presupposed by such changes furnish crucial diachronic corroboration for the notion of ‘morphomes’ as elaborated by M. Aronoff (Morphology By Itself 1994), and in general for the importance of ‘inferential-realizational’ strategies in acquisition and language change (see G. Stump Inflectional Morphology 2000). Aronoff arguably underestimates the possibility that the ‘morphomic’ structures he identifies could be synchronically ‘accidental’, a mere inert residue of an earlier état de langue in which such structures had an extramorphological justification. Martin Maiden’s work has not only shown, from diachronic evidence, the correctness of Aronoff’s assumptions of psychological reality, but elevates ‘morphomes’ into the role of ‘major players’ in morphological change, as evidenced by various types of analogical change which are inexplicable without reference to morphomic structure. The central question our project addresses is how pervasive are ‘morphomic’, autonomously morphological, structures in the Romance inflectional system, and their importance in determining diachronic change in the paradigmatic system. A major issue that the establishment of a corpus of Romance autonomous morphological structure promises to illuminate is the possibility that what matters most for speakers in the acquisition of inflectional paradigms is not so much functional transparency or phonological motivation, as systematic predictability of patterning. To address these issues we need to assemble and organize the mass of available data. Therefore the project is constructing two databases: a bibliographical database on verb morphology related writings covering the entire Romania; the first ever comprehensive comparative-historical database of the morphology of the Romance verb.
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