The Romance Verb ― Morphomic Structure and Diachrony

This book is the first comprehensive comparative-historical survey of patterns of alternation in the Romance verb which appear to be 'autonomously morphological': although they can be shown to be persistent through time, they have long ceased to be conditioned by any phonological or functional determinant. Some of these patterns are well known in Romance linguistics, while others have scarcely been noticed. The sheer range of phenomena which participate in these patterns in any case far surpasses what Romance linguists had previously realized. The patterns constitute a kind of abstract 'leitmotiv', running through the history of the Romance languages and conferring on them a distinctive morphological physiognomy.

Although intended primarily as a novel contribution to comparative-historical Romance linguistics, the book considers in detail the status of these patterns which appear to be a matter of 'morphology by itself', unsupported by determining factors external to the morphological system. Particular attention is paid to the problem of their persistence, self-replication, and reinforcement over time. Why do abstract morphological patterns that quite literally 'do not make sense' display such diachronic robustness? The evidence suggests that speakers, faced with different ways of expressing semantically identical material, seek out distributional templates into which those differences can be deployed. In Romance the only available templates happen to be 'morphomic', morphologically accidental, effects of old sound changes or defunct functional conditionings. Those patterns are accordingly exploited, and indeed reinforced, by being made maximally predictable.

Martin Maiden is Professor of the Romance Languages at Oxford, a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford (since 1996), and Director of the Oxford Research Centre for Romance Linguistics. He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2003. He studied at Cambridge University, where he also taught Romance Philology from 1989 to 1996. He was Vice-President of the Societa Internazionale di Linguistica Italiana from 2003 to 2004, and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Bucharest (2013). In 2014 he was awarded the Romanian National Order for 'Faithful Service' in the rank of Commander for services to the Romanian language in Britain. His particular research interests are in Italian and Romanian linguistics and dialectology, historical linguistics, and morphology. He is the co-editor, with Adam Ledgeway, of The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages (OUP 2016).