Visible verbal morphology: Morpheme constancy in Germanic and Romance verbal inflection
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Visible verbal morphology: Morpheme constancy in Germanic and Romance verbal inflection Nanna Fuhrhop1
Received: 6 May 2019 / Accepted: 5 November 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In different spelling systems, different grades of morpheme constancy can be found: German has a high degree of morpheme constancy (especially stem constancy, for example rennen – rennt both forms with ), while English has comparatively less (running – run, only the disyllabic form with ). This paper investigates the interaction between stems and verbal inflectional suffixes in terms of constancy in three Germanic languages (Dutch, English, German) and five Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish). Verbal inflection is always the most widespread inflection, so it is a well-defined area for getting an idea of how spelling systems may function. For the Germanic languages, this analysis will primarily focus on the alternation between monosyllabic and disyllabic forms. For the Romance languages, it will focus on the / -alternations in interaction with the following vowel. The aim is to describe a scale of morphological spelling: The alternation of and is not an instance of constancy, but of similarity, something between constancy and non-constancy. Morpheme constancy is no longer a binary feature. Comparing verbal inflection takes us another step towards the development of typological parameters for visible morphology. Keywords Morpheme constancy · Stem constancy · Affix constancy · Morpheme similarity · Stem alternations
1 Introduction In different spelling systems, different grades of morpheme constancy can be found: German has a high degree of morpheme constancy (especially stem constancy, for
B N. Fuhrhop
[email protected]
1
Institut für Germanistik, Universität Oldenburg, Ammerländer Heerstraße 114-118, 26129 Oldenburg, Germany
N. Fuhrhop
example rennen – rennt both forms with ), while English has comparatively less (running – run, only the disyllabic form with ). This paper investigates the interaction between stems and verbal inflectional suffixes in terms of constancy in three Germanic languages (Dutch, English, German) and five Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish). In all of the languages examined here, there is an interaction between stem and inflectional suffixes in terms of stem constancy or stem variation. This paper focuses first on verbal inflection, and second on special phenomena: for Germanic languages the alternations between monosyllabic and disyllabic verbal forms, and for Romance languages the alternations of and . In a more abstract view, they are more analogous; in Romance languages the phonemegrapheme-correspondences of and depend on the following vowels. This is true for all Romance languages, and the respective spelling systems have to accommodate this. In the three Germanic languages investigated here, verbal suffixes can be syllabic or non-syllabic. Most of the syllabic suffixes start with a vowel. Thus, in the case of Romance languag
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