Alignment of forms in Spanish verbal inflection: the gang poner, tener, venir, salir, valer as a window into the nature of paradigmatic analogy and predictability

Abstract

Abstract The future and conditional forms ofvenir‘come’,tener‘have’ andponer‘put’ were characterized in Old Spanish by various alternatives (e.g.verné,vendré,verré,venréin the case of come.1SG.FUT) which originated through different sound changes taking place in different varieties. The victory ofvendréin contemporary Spanish could be seen simply as an inconsequential resolution of this competition of forms. Here I argue against such an interpretation. I will provide quantitative geographical and diachronic evidence which suggests that the adoption of the variantvendréis related to other apparently unconnected analogical changes (most notablyvalo>valgo‘be worth.1SG.PRES.IND’) in the history of the language. These two changes have conspired to align different morphological operations in a way that inflectional predictability is achieved from scratch. This development shows that predictability can be a major force in morphological change even between formally dissimilar morphological units and outside of the usual suspects the ‘morphomes’. The emergence of predictability networks like this one has important implications, touching on vital issues like segmentation, analogical change, the status of No-Blur, among others.

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