After a brief survey of the perception of morphological change in the standard works of the Hispanic tradition in the 20th century, the author first attempts to refine concepts such as analogy, leveling, blending, contamination, etc. as they have been applied to Spanish. He then revisits difficult problems of Spanish historical grammar and explores the extent to which various types of morphological processes may have operated in a given change. Selected problems are examined in light of abundant textual evidence. Some include: the resistance to change of Sp. dormir 'to sleep', morir 'to die', the vocalic sequence /ee/, the reduction of the OSp. verbal suffixes -ades, -edes, -ides, -odes, and the uncertain origin of Sp. eres 'you are'. Important notions such as the directionality of leveling, phonological vs. morphological change in the nominal and verbal paradigms, the morphological spread of sound change, and the role of morphological factors in apparent syntactic change are discussed.

The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Morphology presents a state-of-the-art, detailed and exhaustive overview of all aspects of Spanish morphology, paying equal attention to the empirical complexities of the morphological system and the theoretical issues that they raise. As such, this handbook is relevant both for those interested in the facts of Spanish morphology and those interested in general morphology that want to explore how the Spanish facts illuminate our understanding of human language and current theories of morphology. This volume is also unique in its extent and coverage. Written by an international team of leading experts in the field, it contains 42 chapters divided into four sections, covering all synchronic and diachronic aspects of Spanish morphology, including inflection; derivation; compounding and other processes of word formation; the interaction of morphology with other modules of grammar and the role of morphology in language acquisition, psycholinguistics and language teaching.

This volume presents new developments in cognitive grammar and explores its descriptive and explanatory potential with respect to a wide range of language phenomena. These include the formation and use of locationals, causative constructions, adjectival and nominal expressions of oriented space, morphological layering, tense and aspect, and extended uses of verbal predicates. There is also a section on the affinities between cognitive grammar an early linguistic theories, both ancient and modern.

This is the second of two volumes emanating from the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages held at the University of Texas at Austin in February 2005. It features the keynote addresses delivered by Prof. Jacques Durand on the Phonology of Contemporary French Project and Prof. John Charles Smith on skeuomorphy and refunctionalization. It also includes eleven contributions by reputed scholars on topics ranging from phonetics, phonology, morphophonology, dialectology, sociolinguistics and language variation. Formal phonology papers favor the model of Optimality Theory, while phonetic measurements serve as the basis for sociolinguistic and dialectometric studies. Many of these studies emphasize new comparative, typological approaches to Romance data (including many non-standard varieties of French, Italian and Spanish). This volume will be of interest to all Romance linguists.

This book collects all the named laws of Indo-European, presents each in its original form and rationale and then provides an evaluation of all major attacks, revisions and exploitations, along with a full bibliography and index. Complete thorough exhaustive.

This volume brings together a selection of papers from the eighteenth 'Going Romance' symposium, held at Leiden University, 9–11 December 2004. These papers cover a broad range of topics in phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, and acquisition, in a variety of Romance languages.

In the historical development of many languages of the IE phylum the loss of inflectional morphology led to the development of a configurational syntax, where syntactic position marked syntactic role. The first of these configurations was the adposition (preposition or postposition), which developed out of the uninflected particle/preverbs in the older forms of IE, by forming fixed phrases with nominal elements, a pattern later followed in the development of a configurational NP (article + nominal) and VP (auxiliary + verbal). The authors follow this evolution through almost four thousand years of documentation in all twelve language families of the Indo-European phylum, noting the resemblances between the structure of the original IE case system and the systemic oppositions to be found in the sets of adpositions that replaced it. Quite apart from its theoretical analyses and proposals which in themselves amount to a new look at many traditional problems, this study has a value in the collected store of information on cases, and on adpositions and their usage. There is also a considerable store of etymological information that is relevant to the description of the systemic development.