Main issues in the diachronic development of Spanish inflection

• Autores: Antonio Fábregas Alfaro, Isabel Pujol Payet
• Localización: The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Morphology / coord. por Antonio Fábregas Alfaro, Víctor Acedo Matellán, Grant Amstrong, María Cristina Cuervo, Isabel Pujol Payet, 2021, ISBN 978-0-429-31819-1, págs. 163-181
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • This chapter discusses a number of diachronic changes in the inflectional system of nouns, adjectives and verbs from Latin to Modern Spanish, with the goal of pointing out several changes of relevance for the analysis of Spanish morphology and highlighting a few main processes of particular significance for morphological theory. It presents a description of the main phenomena involving case, gender and number in nouns; degree and agreement in adjectives and conjugation classes and paradigmatic expression in verbs. Noun inflection is a complex topic which, at a bare minimum, involves gender and number marking. The chapter focuses on three different aspects of this marking that people consider crucial within the diachronic evolution from Latin to Spanish: the process of case loss, which etymologically explains the use of -s as a plural marking with nouns—and adjectives—; the reduction and reanalysis of declension classes and consequent reorganisation of the gender system and the modification of the gender information contained in some affixes.