Sascha Gaglia

Associate Professor of Morphology and Its Interface with Syntax Xavier Bach

Xavier Bach

Louise Esher

Professor of Romance Linguistics Sascha Gaglia

This volume brings together specialists in inflectional morphology, historical linguistics, and dialectology to explore the processes, directionality, models, and targets of morphological analogy. The chapters draw on atlas data and historical sources, as well as experimental and computational methods, and present case studies from a range of Romance and Germanic languages. Existing work on inferential relationships, predictability, and complexity has investigated what information speakers can access with respect to the shape of inflectional forms; the studies presented here examine how speakers make use of that information and shed light on the properties and contours of inflectional structure. The book is divided into three thematic sections that explore, respectively: the range of objects and patterns that morphological analogy can manipulate; the influence of frequency effects on the choice of models and targets in analogical change; and the mechanisms of change and how these can be modelled. The contributors discuss a variety of significant theoretical issues including the advantages of different models of analogy and inflection, constraints on the choice of template for analogy, autonomous morphology, and non-canonical inflection and morphological complexity. The historical, variationist approaches taken here will complement the considerable existing body of theoretical work in this field and will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on language change, language complexity, and word structure.

Inflection in Romance and Beyond

Comparative and Dialectal Approaches to Analogy

Marc-Olivier Hinzelin

Morphology, and in particular word formation, has always played an important role in Romance linguistics since it was introduced in Diez's comparative Romance grammar. Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in inflectional morphology, and current research shows a strong interest in paradigmatic analyses. This volume brings together research exploring different areas of morphology from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives. On an empirical basis, the theoretical assumption of the 'Autonomy of Morphology' is discussed critically. 'Data-driven' approaches carefully examine concrete morphological phenomena in Romance languages and dialects. Topics include syncretism and allomorphy in verbs, pronouns, and articles as well as the use of specific derivational suffixes in word formation. Together, the articles in this volume provide insights into issues currently debated in Romance morphology, appealing to scholars of morphology, Romance linguistics, and advanced students alike.

Sascha Gaglia

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