| Summary: | This study makes a novel descriptive generalization about the historical morphology of the Romance verbs. Regular sound change gave rise, in different Romance languages and in different forms, to a type of allomorphy restricted to the first person singular preterite. While the facts are well described in the literature, these allomorphs show a common diachronic trend which has never been noticed. Despite their paradigmatic ‘isolation’, they tend not only to survive but to be extended to other parts of the preterite and even beyond. This study offers some brief speculation on the reasons for this behaviour, and calls for more extensive comparative study on the diachrony of ‘single-cell allomorphs’ in the world’s languages.
|
|---|