2011/11/28 by Rosella Spina, Wolfgang U. Dressler
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Linguistic Studies and Language Acquisition #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies
paper · doi:10.1075/dia.28.4.03spi
openalex publication_date 2011/11/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
This paper attempts to predict diachronic change in the restricted domain of Italo-Romance first person plural present indicative allomorphs, starting from the reconstructed Proto-Italo-Romance forms -amo , -emo , -imo , preserved in several dialects to this day (with corresponding subjunctives -emo , -iamo , -iamo ). The predictions, or rather retrodictions (to be differentiated below) are based on the theory of Natural Morphology (NM). Morphology-initiated changes lead to 64 logically conceivable distributions in the earlier and present Italo-Romance dialects. The retrodictions are meant to account for the identity of attested distributions with possible (‘legal’) distributions, for unattested impossible (‘illegal’) distributions and for two accidental gaps in distributions. Moreover, we try to predict why certain attested distributions are more probable and therefore more frequent than others and introduce a new method of empirically testing such probability retrodictions.