Comparative and Dialectal Approaches to Analogy: Inflection in Romance and Beyond

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.

Xavier Bach, Associate Professor of Morphology and its Interface with Syntax, Laboratoire Cognition, Langues, Langages, Ergonomie, CNRS and Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, Louise Esher, Chargé de Recherche, Langage, langues et cultures d’Afrique (LLACAN), CNRS, Sascha Gaglia, Professor of Romance Linguistics, Department of Romance Philology, Freie Universität Berlin

Xavier Bach is Associate Professor of Morphology and its Interface with Syntax at the Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, 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.