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.
This book brings together work in inflectional morphology, historical linguistics, and dialectology to explore the processes, directionality, models, and targets of morphological analogy. The chapters draw on atlas data, historical sources, and experimental and computational methods, and present case studies from Romance and Germanic languages.
1: Xavier Bach;Louise Esher;Sascha Gaglia: Introduction: Studying
variation and change in inflectional analogy
PART I Inflectional patterns and their interaction
2: Martin Maiden: Contamination as a cause of abnormal inflexion-class
changes in 'Alpine' Romance, and what it tells us about word structure
3: Xavier Bach: Additive analogy maximizes left-edge identity of roots in
Romance
4: Judith Meinschaefer: Analogical extension of stress patterns in artificial
language learning
PART II Directionality and frequency effects
5: Hans-Olav Enger: Modal verbs in Norwegian (and Swedish): Between
analogical regularization and analogical irregularization?
6: Franck Floricic: The verbs dire 'say' and venire 'come' as 'leader words'
in Italo-Romance
7: Louise Esher: Productive identities spanning recurrent partials and whole
word forms
PART III Processes and representations of analogy
8: Eugen Hill: Morphological analogy as whole-word replacement: Revisiting
the counterevidence
9: Marc-Olivier Hinzelin: Take-over as analogical change in the creation and
avoidance of syncretism and homonymy
10: John Charles Smith: Overabundance as an epiphenomenon: Competing forms or
competing paradigms?
11: Erich Round: Morphomes, models, emergence, and the mind
Xavier Bach is Associate Professor of Morphology and its Interface with Syntax at the Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurčs, and a researcher in the CNRS research laboratory CLLE (Cognition, Langues, Langage, Ergonomie). He works on inflectional typology, particularly on inflection classes and non-canonical phenomena such as suppletion and heteroclisis, as well as gender, periphrasis, and negation. He specializes in (Gallo)-Romance varieties, as well as in Austronesian languages of West Papua.
Louise Esher is a CNRS researcher based at LLACAN (Langage, Langues et Cultures d'Afrique). Their research focuses on the relationships between inflectional change and the holistic structure of inflectional systems, with particular attention to analogical change and autonomous morphology. Louise is co-editor of the Manuel de linguistique occitane (with Jean Sibille; De Gruyter, 2024) and has contributed to works including The Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Linguistics and The Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics.
Sascha Gaglia is Professor of Romance Linguistics at the Freie Universität Berlin. He works on morpho-phonological, syntactic, and pragmatic phenomena from both a diachronic and synchronic perspective, with a particular interest in clitics, politeness, and paradigmatic analogy. While his main language focus is on Italian and Italian dialects, he has also published work on French, Spanish, and Rhaeto-Romance.
