Contamination as a cause of abnormal inflexion-class changes in ‘Alpine’ Romance, and what it tells us about word structure

Book section : Chapter

This study explores some anomalies in the history of ‘conjugations’ (inflexion classes in verbs) in the Romance languages, and particularly in Ladin dialects, with some other varieties of the Alpine area. At issue is a small, generally closed and unproductive, class which I label the ‘second/third’ conjugation, and a considerably smaller subclass within the ‘second/third’ conjugation labelled simply the ‘second conjugation’. Completely ‘against the grain’ of Romance conjugation-class changes, certain verbs, of ‘modal’ or ‘meteorological’ meaning, not only unexpectedly enter the ‘second/third’ conjugation but even penetrate its inner sanctum, the second conjugation. I claim that these anomalous developments are the result of associative interference between semantically similar lexemes (‘contamination’) and that they throw particular light on the fluid nature of the relation between the expression of lexical meaning and internal morphological structure in inflexional word forms.

Authors: Maiden, M

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Host title: Comparative and Dialectal Approaches to Analogy: Inflection in Romance and Beyond
• Pages: 21-44
• Chapter number: 2
• Series: Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics
• Place of publication: Oxford / New York
• Publication date: 2025-08-29
• Edition: 1
• DOI: 10.1093/9780191995231.003.0002
• EISBN: 9780191995231
• ISBN: 9780198888741
• Language: English
• Keywords: contamination; analogy; Ladin; modal verbs; Romance; morphological segmentation; inflexion classes
• Subtype: Chapter