Acceso usuarios
Township of Cunningham, Estados Unidos
This study investigates the diachronic development of the Spanish L-morphome, a pattern characterized by velar insertion in the 1sg present indicative and the whole of the present subjunctive. A central question regarding the diachronic development of L-morphomes is whether the 1sg indicative form is the primary model from which other forms are analogically derived, or if all forms are hierarchically equal, as expected under morphomic “coherence”. Using a corpus of texts from the 13th to 17th centuries, I compare forms in the 1sg present indicative with other members of the L-morphome and assess the stability of morphomic coherence through author-level analysis.
The results show that 1sg present indicatives exhibit higher rates of innovative velar forms in Old Spanish, suggesting that they function as models upon which other forms derive. Individual author analysis reveals that the L-morphome does not operate as a fully coherent system: authors display inconsistent allomorphic usage, with unpredictable forms across the pattern.
These findings complicate the notion of the L-morphome as a fully coherent morphomic system, revealing a gradient pattern in which analogy is dependent on the 1sg present indicative form. Importantly, this study empirically tests the notion of the L-morphome quantitatively in diachrony.
