Future and conditional in Occitan: a non-canonical morphome⋆

Abstract

The stem identity of the Romance synthetic future and conditional is frequently attributed to a common semantic value. Drawing on data from modern varieties of Occitan, I show that while the future and conditional do share semantic content, most plausibly the value ‘projection’, the distribution of the characteristic future/conditional stem does not correlate with any semantically defined natural class. I argue that the set future+conditional is an example of a ‘weakly morphomic’ distribution, partly but not exhaustively determined by extramorphological (in this case semantic) factors. The arbitrary nature of the distribution is underlined by numerous attestations of asymmetry, in which the familiar stem identity between future and conditional is sporadically broken.

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