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

AbstractThe future and conditional forms of venir ‘come’, tener ‘have’ and poner ‘put’ were characterized in Old Spanish by various alternatives (e.g. verné, vendré, verré, venré in the case of come.1SG.FUT) which originated through different sound changes taking place in different varieties. The victory of vendré in 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 variant vendré is related to other apparently unconnected analogical changes (most notably valo>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.