Download Where does heteroclisis come from? Evidence from Romanian

Morphology
DOI 10.1007/s11525-009-9130-0
ORIGINAL PAPER
Where does heteroclisis come from? Evidence
from Romanian dialects
Martin Maiden
Received: 15 June 2008 / Accepted: 20 January 2009
Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009
Abstract This study examines some cases of heteroclisis in the history of
Romanian dialects, and concludes that the data call for a reconsideration of Stump’s
distinction (Language 82:279–322, 2006) between ‘cloven’ heteroclisis, where the
intraparadigmatic ‘split’ is aligned with some morphosyntactic feature distinction,
and ‘fractured’ heteroclisis, where this is not the case and the pattern of heteroclisis
is purely morphological. Stump’s account creates the impression that the ‘cloven’
variety is universally predominant, and that the ‘fractured’ variety tends to follow
very closely the available ‘cloven’ patterns of the language. I shall suggest, instead,
that the ‘fractured-only’ situation may in fact underlie heteroclisis cross-linguistically, the phenomenon being in general sensitive not directly to morphosyntactic
content, but rather to characteristic, and often purely ‘morphomic’, patterns of stemallomorphy.
Keywords
Heteroclisis Paradigm Inflection
1 Introduction
The phenomenon of heteroclisis defined, for example, by Stump (2006, p. 278) as
‘the property of a lexeme whose inflectional paradigm contains forms built on stems
belonging to two or more distinct inflection classes’, has long languished in the
backwaters of morphological enquiry, often being treated as a matter of merely
Research for this paper was undertaken as part of the Arts and Humantities Research Council-funded
project Autonomous Morphology in Diachrony: comparative evidence from the Romance
Languages, currently being conducted at Oxford University.
M. Maiden (&)
Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
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M. Maiden
lexical idiosyncrasy. Stump’s paper, however, convincingly demonstrates from a
broad cross-linguistic survey that heteroclisis is a significant variety of mismatch
between a language’s ‘content paradigms’ and its ‘form paradigms’, which is
subject to language-specific principles of linkage between them (see Stump 2002;
2006, pp. 284–293).
Stump’s perspective is macroscopic and synchronic. This present study is, in
contrast, microscopic and diachronic. It is largely restricted to Romanian and,
principally, to a cluster of dialects spoken in western Romania. Moreover, it is
mainly concerned with just two verbs in those dialects,1 a coase ‘to sew’ and a t,ese
‘to weave’,2 and it identifies the historical mechanisms by which heteroclisis
emerged in these verbs. It seems to reflect the overall neglect of heteroclisis that
there is not, so far as I am aware, any general theory of how the phenomenon might
develop historically. What follows is one contribution towards such an account; it is
at least a start, and its applicability to a wider range of cross-linguistic data will be a
matter of empirical testing by those with appropriate historical knowledge of other
languages in which heteroclisis occurs. It is unlikely, however, that the mechanisms
identified are in any way peculiar to Romanian dialects.
Briefly and schematically, my data reveal a situation in which sound change gave
rise in certain lexemes to ambiguous inflection-class membership in a small subset
of cells of their paradigm; this led to a reanalysis of inflection-class membership,
resulting in the analogical extension of forms associated with the new inflectionclass into other parts of the inflectional paradigm of those lexemes. Crucially,
heteroclisis arose because this extension was arrested before it pervaded the whole
1
My principal source of data is Noul Atlas Lingvistic Rom^an pe Regiuni. Oltenia (‘The New
Romanian Linguistic Atlas by Regions. Oltenia’—hereafter NALROltenia) which documents in extenso,
for 98 survey points, both a coase and a t,ese. The relevant data are found in volume V, maps 965-969 (for
a t,ese) and 975–978 (for a coase). The forms described there are: a t,ese Present indicative (map 965);
Subjunctive (map 968); Imperfect (map 968); Preterite (map 966); Pluperfect (map 966); Present participle (map 967); Imperative (map 969); Negative imperative (in the second person singular, negator + infinitive) (map 969); Future (a variety of structures, including auxiliary + infinitive) (map 967);
Perfect indicative (auxiliary ‘have’ + past participle) (map 966); Perfect subjunctive (auxiliary ‘be’ +
past participle) (map 968); Conditional (auxiliary + infinitive) (map 969); Past conditional (conditional of
‘be’ + past participle) (map 969); a coase: Present indicative (map 975); Subjunctive (map 975);
Imperfect (map 976); Preterite (map 976); Pluperfect (map 976); Present participle (map 975); Imperative
(map 978); Negative imperative (in the second person singular, negator + infinitive) (map 978); Future
(a variety of structures, including auxiliary + infinitive) (map 977); Perfect indicative (auxiliary
‘have’ + past participle) (map 976); Perfect subjunctive (auxiliary ‘be’ + past participle) (map 75);
Conditional (auxiliary + infinitive) (map 977); Past conditional (conditional of ‘be’ + past participle)
(map 977).
2
That these verbs belong to much the same semantic domain is accidental, the crucial factors being, as
we shall see later, their phonological structure and original conjugation class. It is worth noting that ‘sew’
is hardly among the semantic ‘usual suspects’ for morphological eccentricity. Linguists are unlikely to be
surprised to learn that erratic morphological behaviour appears in very high frequency verbs having very
basic meanings and very low semantic specificity, such as ‘existence’, ‘possession’, ‘location’, ‘motion’,
and sometimes ‘eating’ and ‘seeing’. But in ‘sew’ and ‘weave’ we seem to be dealing with a word of
highly specific meaning and probably not very high frequency. Sewing may be a basic and possibly
universal human domestic activity, but it has a very low frequency in usage (see, for example, Juilland,
Edwards and Juilland 1965, p. 61), and a highly specific semantic content. Neither semantics nor frequency are likely to have any significant role in the morphological behaviour we shall be observing in this
verb.
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Where does heteroclisis come from?
of the paradigm. Of particular interest in this study is the nature of the intraparadigmatic ‘barriers’ which halted the spread of the innovation in this way, thereby
giving rise to an intraparadigmatic ‘split’ between inflection classes. In this respect
Romanian heteroclisis is strikingly unlike virtually all of what Stump describes, for
it cannot be described in terms of any coherent class of morphosyntactic features. It
appears to be the case that no instance of heteroclisis attested in any variety, or
historical stage, of Romanian is, in Stump’s terminology, ‘morphosyntactically
conditioned’: rather, all Romanian heteroclisis is purely ‘morphological’. Indeed, it
is ‘morphomic’ in the sense of Aronoff (1994), being sensitive to arrays of paradigmatic cells which are not reducible to any common semantic or grammatical
function. Most importantly, the relevant arrays of cells have, over and over again in
the history of Romanian, been the locus of other major intraparadigmatic fractures,
principally but not exclusively involving stem-allomorphy.
I do not conclude from all this that Stump’s data and mine are incompatible.
Rather, I shall suggest that the Romanian facts may call for a reconsideration of
Stump’s distinction between what he calls ‘cloven’ heteroclisis (where the ‘split’ is
aligned with some morphosyntactic feature distinction, such as singular versus
plural), and ‘fractured’ heteroclisis, where this is not the case. Stump’s account
creates the impression that the ‘cloven’ variety is universally predominant, and that
the ‘fractured’ variety, in so far as it exists, tends to adhere very closely to available3
‘cloven’ patterns in the language. I shall consider the possibility instead that the
‘fractured-only’ situation found in Romanian might be simply the tip of an iceberg
which may underlie heteroclisis cross-linguistically, the phenomenon being in
general sensitive not directly to morphosyntactic content, but to existing patterns of
stem-allomorphy.
2 A brief sketch of Romanian inflection classes in the verb
Modern standard Romanian can serve to illustrate the conjugational organization
generally found in Daco-Romanian dialects and, although there is no general
relation of historical precedence between the standard variety and other dialects, the
former happens to represent a historically earlier stage in respect of most of the
phenomena to be examined in this study (Tables 1–5). I follow the conventional
descriptive model in recognizing four major conjugational classes, which I present
for convenience of exposition in the order first, fourth, second and third. Stress is
here marked by an acute accent (absent in orthography); the letters ^a (with Rits
homophonous allograph ^ı), ă, ßt and ßs represent respectively [], [ ], [ts] and [ ];
word-final unstressed i is normally asyllabic; oa and ea represent, respectively,
diphthongs [oa] and [ea].
e
˘
˘
3
As I shall mention later, he does also admit the possible existence of fractured but not cloven heteroclisis.
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M. Maiden
Table 1 First conjugationa
Past participle
Gerund
Infinitive
1SG
2SG
3SG
1PL
2PL
3PL
‘sing’
c^
antát
0
c^
anta^nd
c^
antá
present
c^
ant
0
ca^ntßi
0
ca^ntă
0
c^
antă m
c^
antátßi
0
ca^ntă
imperative
0
ca^ntă
c^antátßi
subjunctive
c^ant
0
ca^ntßi
0
ca^nte
0
c^antă m
c^antátßi
0
ca^nte
imperfect
c^antám
c^antái
c^antá
c^antám
c^antátßi
c^antáu
preterite
c^antái
c^antásß i
0
c^antă
c^antárăm
c^antárătßi
c^antáră
pluperfect
c^antásem
c^antásesß i
c^antáse
c^antáserăm
c^antáserătßi
c^antáseră
a
This class has two subclasses, one of which is presented here, while the other (comprising about 50%
of first conjugation verbs) has an additional, stress-bearing, formative (or ‘augment’) -ez- (or its
allomorph -eaz-) between the lexical root and the inflectional ending in the singular and third person
forms of the present and the subjunctive, and in the 2SG imperative: e.g., 1SG.PRES lucréz ‘I work’
0
versus 1PL.PRES lucră m
Table 2 Fourth conjugationa
Past participle
Gerund
Infinitive
1SG
2SG
3SG
1PL
2PL
3PL
‘love’
iubı́t
iubı́nd
iubı́
present
iubésc
iubésß ti
iubésß te
iubı́m
iubı́ßi
t
iubésc
imperative
iubésß te
iubı́ßi
t
subjunctive
iubésc
iubésß ti
iubeáscă
iubı́m
iubı́ßi
t
iubeáscă
imperfect
iubeám
iubeái
iubeá
iubeám
iubeátßi
iubeáu
preterite
iubı́i
iubı́ßs i
iubı́
iubı́răm
iubı́rătßi
iubı́ră
pluperfect
iubı́sem
iubı́sesß i
iubı́se
iubı́serăm
iubı́serătßi
iubı́seră
a
The great majority of fourth conjugation verbs display a special formative (or ‘augment’), between the
lexical root and the inflectional ending in the singular and third person forms of the present and the
subjunctive. This ‘augment’ has the allomorphs -esc-, -esß t- or -easc-. Only a handful of fourth conjugation
verbs lack this formative. I have not considered here a further subclass of fourth conjugation verbs in
which front vowels following the root have been (historically) centralized: e.g., past participle ur^at,
0
0
infinitive ur^ı, 1SG.PRES ură sc, 3SG.PRES urăßs te, 3SG.SBJV uráscă, IMPF urám
Table 3 Second conjugation
Past participle
Gerund
Infinitive
1SG
2SG
3SG
1PL
2PL
3PL
‘be able’
123
putút
put^
and
puteá
present
pot
pótßi
poáte
putém
putétßi
pot
imperative
subjunctive
pot
pótßi
poátă
putém
putétßi
poátă
imperfect
puteám
puteái
puteá
puteám
puteátßi
puteáu
preterite
putúi
putúsß i
putú
putúrăm
putúrătßi
putúră
pluperfect
putúsem
putúsesß i
putúse
putúserăm
putúserătßi
putúseră
Where does heteroclisis come from?
Table 4 Third conjugation type (a)
Past participle
Gerund
Infinitive
1SG
2SG
3SG
1PL
2PL
3PL
‘weave’
ßesút
t
0
ßesa
t ^nd
ßése
t
present imperative
ßes
t
ßés
t ßi
ßése
t
ßése
t
ßésem
t
ßéset
t ßi
ßéset
t ßi
ßes
t
subjunctive
ßes
t
ßés
t ßi
ßeásă
t
ßésem
t
ßéset
t ßi
ßeásă
t
imperfect
ßeseám
t
ßeseái
t
ßeseá
t
ßeseám
t
ßeseát
t
ßi
ßeseáu
t
preterite
ßesúi
t
ßesús
t ßi
ßesú
t
ßesúrăm
t
ßesúrăt
t
ßi
ßesúră
t
subjunctive
r^ad
0
ra^zi
0
ra^dă
0
ra^dem
0
ra^detßi
0
ra^dă
imperfect
r^adeám
r^adeái
r^adeá
r^adeám
r^adeátßi
r^adeáu
preterite
r^aséi
r^asésß i
0
ra^se
0
ra^serăm
0
ra^serătßi
0
ra^seră
pluperfect
ßesúsem
t
ßesúses
t
ßi
ßesúse
t
ßesúserăm
t
ßesúserăt
t
ßi
ßesúseră
t
Table 5 Third conjugation type (b)
Past participle
Gerund
Infinitive
1SG
2SG
3SG
1PL
2PL
3PL
‘laugh’
r^
as
0
r^
aza^nd
0
ra^de
present
r^
ad
0
ra^zi
0
ra^de
0
ra^dem
0
ra^detßi
0
ra^d
imperative
0
ra^zi
0
ra^detßi
pluperfect
r^asésem
r^asésesß i
r^asése
r^aséserăm
r^aséserătßi
r^aséseră
The following generalizations emerge:
conjugational distinctions are wholly neutralized in the endings4 of the first and
second persons singular of the present and the subjunctive.
the distinction between first, second and third conjugations is neutralized in the
gerund; but the fourth conjugation has a distinctive ending -ind.
the distinction between second, third and fourth conjugations is neutralized in
the third person present and in the second person singular imperative; but the
first conjugation has a distinctive ending -ă for both.
the distinction between second, third and fourth conjugations is neutralized in
the third person subjunctive; but the first conjugation has a distinctive third
person subjunctive ending -e.
the distinction between second, third and fourth conjugations is neutralized in
the imperfect; but the first conjugation has a distinctive ending -a-.
There is a high degree of parallelism between the first and fourth conjugations in
that they each show a distinctive stressed thematic vowel, respectively a or i, in the
black cells in Table 6 (note however that the vowel in the first conjugation 1PL
0
present and subjunctive is ă ). The first conjugation also displays the thematic vowel
á in the imperfect, while the fourth conjugation has in the imperfect eá, shared
with the second and third conjugations (the relevant cells are shaded in Table 6).
4
Where ‘augments’ are present, the first and fourth conjugations are distinguished.
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M. Maiden
Table 6 Domains in which the first and fourth conjugations both display their respective stressed
thematic vowel
Past participle
Gerund
Infinitive
present imperative subjunctive imperfect preterite pluperfect
1SG
2SG
3SG
1PL
2PL
3PL
Conversely, the fourth conjugation also displays the thematic vowel ı́ in the gerund,
0
while the first conjugation has in the gerund a^, shared with the second and third
conjugations (shaded in the Table).
Similar distribution of a thematic vowel is observable in the second and third
conjugations, with some important modifications:
in third conjugation verbs the formative corresponding to the thematic vowel of
the first and fourth conjugations is unstressed in the first and second persons plural
present, subjunctive, imperative and infinitive—stress falling instead on the root
there is not one vowel corresponding to the thematic vowel of the first and
fourth conjugations, but two quite different ones: e in the present, subjunctive,
imperative and infinitive,5 but u in the preterite, pluperfect and past participle
a sizeable minority of second and third conjugation verbs (labelled above ‘type b’)
have, instead of root + u, a special idiosyncratic root allomorph (followed by e)
which, in at least parts of the preterite, bears stress (see for example Table 5).
Finally, there are major differences of frequency and productivity between conjugations. Romanian has two productive conjugation classes, the first and the fourth.
Historically, the fourth (type a) was the dominant class, while in more recent history
the first has tended to prevail, but not absolutely. In contrast, the second and third
have long been closed, unproductive classes. If we exclude derived forms, the
second has about a dozen members, while the third numbers over a hundred.
5
Historically, at least, the -eá of the second conjugation infinitive is a positional variant of /e/ occurring
under stress.
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Where does heteroclisis come from?
Table 7 Conjugation of a coase in standard Romanian
Past participle
Gerund
Infinitive
1SG
2SG
3SG
1PL
2PL
3PL
cusút
0
cosa^nd
coáse
present
cos
cós, i
coáse
coásem
coáset,i
cos
imperative
coáse
coáset,i
subjunctive
cos
cós, i
coásă
coásem
coáset,i
coásă
imperfect
coseám
coseái
coseá
coseám
coseát,i
coseáu
preterite
cusúi
cusús, i
cusú
cusúrăm
cusúrăt,i
cusúră
pluperfect
cusúse
cusúses, i
cusúse
cusúserăm
cusúserăt,i
cusúseră
As for heteroclisis, it is, overall, very rare in Romanian. I mention later some
cases of heteroclite first and fourth conjugation verbs, but the modern standard
language shows no sign of heteroclisis in second and third conjugation verbs. We
shall see below that matters are rather different in certain dialects, with regard to at
least to the third conjugation verbs a coase and a t,ese.
3 Heteroclisis in a coase and a ,tese
A coase ‘to sew’ and a t,ese ‘to weave’ originate in Latin CONSUERE and TEXERE. The
conjugation of the latter has already been given in Table 4. The former is conjugated similarly (Table 7).
The standard Romanian forms are, broadly speaking, regular and unremarkable6
reflexes of their Latin antecedents. Compare these with the following data from the
Oltenian dialect of Belot,u (NALROltenia point 970, Teaha et al. 1984) in southwestern Romania.7 The verbs ‘weave’ and ‘sew’ are here juxtaposed with a regular
first conjugation verb (a c^
antá ‘to sing’) and a regular third conjugation verb
(a vı́nde ‘to sell’): it will be clear that the first two verbs have, in a number of
respects, lost inflectional characteristics of the third conjugation, and acquired instead those of the first. Those parts of the paradigm which show distinctively first
conjugation morphology, are boxed together with the corresponding ‘real’ first
conjugation form (Table 8):
This pattern of heteroclisis is characteristic of virtually the whole of central and
southern Oltenia. The reflexes of CONSUERE and TEXERE, and perhaps of some other
verbs as well,8 show first conjugation morphology throughout the present, the
6
I comment later on the significance of the allomorphs cos- and cus-, a feature unique to this verb.
7
Examples from dialects are given in conventional Romanian orthography, with occasional addition of
diacritics where appropriate (for example an acute accent to mark stress). The Romanian regional
linguistic atlases use an augmented and refined version of standard Romanian orthography for phonetic
transcription, which could not easily be reproduced. Rather than risk traducing the fine phonetic detail of
the original by attempting to transpose forms into IPA, I have preferred to use a ‘broad’ transcription
based on standard orthography, employing additional diacritics only where they are relevant to my
argument
8
These two verbs are the only ones for which NALROltenia provides really comprehensive data. No
doubt other verbs with a similar phonological history (in respects to be explained below) may behave
similarly. See Gamillscheg (1936, p. 153) and Lombard (1955, pp. 610, n1, 611).
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M. Maiden
Table 8 Heteroclisis in a coase and a t,ese in Belot,u
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Where does heteroclisis come from?
Table 8 continued
imperative, the subjunctive, the imperfect and the infinitive; but they show third
conjugation morphology everywhere else. A further example is from the dialect
of Slăvut,a (point 924), Table 9:
The propensity of a coase, in particular, to heteroclisis is not limited to the
pattern we observe in Oltenia. Unpublished materials9 for the regional linguistic
atlases of the Banat (broadly to the west and north of Oltenia), and of Crisß ana (to the
north of the Banat), also show this verb as heteroclite. Like Oltenian, virtually every
dialect showing heteroclisis displays first conjugation morphology in the singular
and third person plural forms of the present and of the subjunctive, and in second
person singular imperative forms. But there the resemblance stops: in the remainder
of the paradigm we find not first conjugation morphology, but two different kinds of
conjugational innovation.
In most of southern and central Crisß ana the whole of the rest of the paradigm
shifts not to the first conjugation, but to the fourth. The result is the following
pattern (Table 10), where the boxed areas show first conjugation morphology, and
the vertically shaded areas show fourth conjugation morphology:
Note that in these dialects the fourth conjugation thematic vowel i regularly
changes to ^
a when preceded by various kinds of fricative, including /s/: this ^a is
9
I am particularly grateful to Ion Mării, Eugen Beltechi, Dorin Uritßescu and Doina Chisß for facilitating
my access to the unpublished materials of Noul Atlas Lingvistic Rom^an pe Regiuni for Transylvania,
Banat and Crisß ana, now all held at Institutul de Lingvistică s, i Filologie ‘Sextil Pus, cariu’ in Cluj.
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M. Maiden
Table 9 Heteroclisis in Slăvut,a
therefore to be recognized as a marker of fourth conjugation membership, corresponding to i in other verbs. Representative of the development illustrated in (10) is
the dialect of Sintea Mare10 (point 128), which has fourth conjugation thematic ^a in
1PL and 2PL present and subjunctive cos^
am, cos^
at,, infinitive cos^a, gerund cos^and,
2PL imperative cos^
at,, past participle cos^
at and preterite cos^ai (there is no synthetic
pluperfect in this dialect). We can assert that the fourth conjugation has not penetrated the singular and third person forms of the present and subjunctive, or the
2SG imperative, because it is a normal characteristic of productive fourth conjugation verbs that they display a distinctive ‘augment’ (see footnote in Table 2) in
these parts of the paradigm, while there is no sign of any such augment in this verb.
10
Substantially similar developments at ßS epreusß (127), Socodor (129), Tămasß da (131), Ciumeghiu (132),
Ceica (144), Chesß a (145), Olcea (147), Gurbediu (149), Homorog (150), S^annicolau Rom^an (152),
Miersig (155), with other localities also showing signs of generalization of fourth conjugation forms.
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Where does heteroclisis come from?
Table 10 Pattern of fourth conjugation forms in heteroclite verbs in central and southern Crisß ana
Past participle
Gerund
?a
Infinitive
present imperative subjunctive imperfect preterite
1SG
2SG
3SG
1PL
2PL
3PL
a
One cannot be sure of the conjugation class of the gerund, because the potential conjugational distinction
is phonologically neutralized by centralization (see below)
We find the same distributional pattern widely in central and southern Banat,11
except that where Crisß ana has the fourth conjugation thematic vowel ^a, the relevant
dialects have instead—and remarkably—the vowel u (boxed forms in Table 11),
which also regularly occurs in the preterite and past participle.12 A good example is
the dialect of Munar (point 65) (Table 11)13:
To summarize, the third conjugation verb ‘to sew’ (often also the verb ‘to
weave’) has acquired over a wide area of western Romania a heteroclite conjugation
pattern. Moreover, a coase in particular develops not one kind of heteroclisis, but
11
See also Uritßescu (2007, p. 73) for the first and second person plural present of this verb in nearby
Bogda. There are some outcrops of the same phenomenon outside the Banat, for example at Cornesß ti
(943) in north-western Oltenia with /u/ supplied (alongside first conjugation alternatives) in the 1PL and
2PL subjunctive, and in the gerund, and alongside first and fourth conjugation alternatives in the 2PL
negative imperative. The /u/ recurs in the 2PL imperative in some localities of southern Crisß ana (Micălaca
106, Comlăusß 112, ßS iria 113), where there are also cases of infinitive [ku|su] (at Chiraleu 163). Micălaca
also has 1PL and 2PL in /u/ (at least in the subjunctive). The phenomenon appears not to occur in the
regions of Maramuresß , Transylvania, Muntenia or Dobrogea, but from personal observation I can attest
that it occurs in at least one locality in Moldova (Dobreni, Neamtß county). I have even encountered a
couple of examples in standard Romanian texts on the Internet, but in these cases the origin of the writers
is unknown to me.
12
The introduction of /u/ is particularly common in the 2PL imperative (38 localities across most of the
Banat, or 47 if we include the 2PL negative imperative, which, in some localities but not all, is built on
the (old) infinitive in -re), followed by the 1PL and 2PL present and/or subjunctive (19 localities), the
infinitive (17 localities) and the gerund (10 localities). The 2PL imperative in /u/ actually has a curious
geographical expansion into parts of north-western Banat which do not otherwise have centralization in
the 3SG present or conjugation shift. In northern Crisß ana, the 2PL imperative is a locus of /u/ in localities
which show no other sign of conjugation shift (Hereclean 180, Vezendiu 192, Căuasß 193) The fact that
the imperative tends particularly to favour this innovation is interesting, and has to do with general
properties of imperatives which I intend to treat in another study (see also Maiden 2006, 2007).
13
See also Denta (40), Toager (42).
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M. Maiden
Table 11 Heteroclisis involving thematic /u/ in the Banat dialect of Munar
several, according to region. What all the dialects affected have in common is a
partial shift to the first conjugation at least in this verb. In many Oltenian dialects
the verb then further splits between first and third conjugation, forms of the first
pervading the present, subjunctive, imperative, imperfect and infinitive, the latter
remaining elsewhere. In both Crisß ana and Banat, first conjugation morphology
appears in the singular and third person forms of the present and the subjunctive,
and the second person singular imperative, as well as the imperfect. In Crisß ana the
tendency is for fourth conjugation forms to occupy the rest of the paradigm, while in
the Banat we find instead of the fourth conjugation thematic vowel, a vowel u. The
Banat case is, admittedly, a rather curious strain of heteroclisis: the u that occurs has
the same distribution as the thematic vowels of the first and fourth conjugation, so
that it looks, paradigmatically, like the marker of yet another conjugation class.
Except that this is a ‘class’ comprising at most a minuscule handful of lexical
members, and in some places just one.
4 The origins of heteroclisis in a coase and a t,ese.
The only unproblematic aspect of heteroclisis in a coase and a t,ese is its original
trigger. It is clearly the result of a neutralizing sound change which gave rise to
inflection class ambiguity in part of the paradigm. If we look at a northern Oltenian
dialect, such as that of Dobrit,a (point 935), we find in these two verbs (unlike other
123
Where does heteroclisis come from?
Table 12 A coase in the dialect of Dobrit,a
third conjugation verbs) what appears to be first conjugation morphology, but this
time restricted just to the third person present, the 2SG imperative and the imperfect. Thus a coase (Table 12):
The distribution of the (apparent) first conjugation morphology in these examples
points to the source of the conjugational change (see also Lombard 1955, p. 1113).
Here, as in a great many other Romanian dialects (see Caragiu-Mariot,eanu 1975,
p. 153), front vowels and front diphthongs i /i/, e /e/ and ea /ea/ have been subject to
a phonetic process which we may call ‘centralization’,
when immediately preceded
R
by the coronal fricatives s /s/, z/z/, t,/ts/, s, / / and j /Z/, so that they yield respectively
^
a//, ă/ / and a/a/. For example, at Dobrit,a, simt ‘feel1SG.PRES’ > s^amt, gráse
0
‘fatFPL’ > grásă, măséle ‘molarPL’ > măsă le, măseá ‘molarSG’ > măsá. Thus
the third person singular present, the singular imperative, and all of the imperfect
forms, simply show the regular effects of the centralization process operating on
original coáse and coseám (etc.), whose inflections have become identical with
those of the first conjugation as a result of the sound change. Apparently14 only the
third person plural present is inexplicable phonetically, given that the historically
underlying form was cos.
˘
e
14
But cf. footnote 17.
123
M. Maiden
While phonetic centralization does not necessarily lead to heteroclisis, heteroclisis overwhelmingly presupposes15 centralization of the kind just illustrated
for Dobrit,a. Introduction, in other dialects, of distinctively first conjugation
morphology can be detected in the following respects, for which there are no
convincing16 alternative phonological explanations:
the 3PL present indicative is identical to the 3SG, and ends in -ă
3SG and 3PL subjunctive ends in -e17
the infinitive ends in-á
0
the 1PL present indicative ends in -ă m
the 2PL present indicative, imperative and subjunctive end in -át,i
The conclusion is clear that a system like that preserved in Dobrit,a underlies all
the dialects with heteroclisis, and that the appearance in these dialects of novel,
distinctively first conjugation, morphology in further parts of the paradigm pivots on
this inflectional ambiguity of the 3SG present.18 A question which rather lies
15
Thus of the thirty localities (out of 100) not showing such centralization in Banat, twenty also show no
sign of conjugation shift, while of the remaining ten, seven only show a shift in the second person plural
imperative.
16
A thorough demonstration of this claim would involve us in more phonological detail than a primarily
morphological study can easily sustain. Suffice it to say that there is absolutely no possible phonological
explanation for the 2PL forms or the 3PL present forms. As for the 1PL and the infinitive, it is true that
some dialects tend to replace third conjugation with second conjugation stress patterns (cf. Cont,iu 1971),
and that a consequence of centralization acting on the stressed endings of the second conjugation above,
0
0
0
would be to produce an infinitive in -á and a 1PL present in - ă m. But t,ăsă m and cosă m, and the
infinitives cosá and t,ăsá, occur in localities where one finds no, or only very rare evidence, for the
relevant conjugation change, for example Piatra Sat (985), M^ars, ani (989), Amărăs, tii de Jos (991).
Moreover, the ‘stress-shift-followed-by-centralization’ account predicts that one should also find wide0
0
0
0
spread examples of the type t,ăsă m t,ăsă t, and cosă m cosă t,, but in Oltenia, for example, there is just one
solitary, and therefore rather doubtful, example, in the subjunctive (but not the 2PL indicative or
imperative) of a coase — in the dialect of Pes, teana Jiu. Given that 1PL and 2PL present and subjunctive
overwhelmingly share the same conjugation marker, and that that marker is clearly of first conjugation
origin in the 2PL, we may conclude that it is likely to be of the same origin in the 1PL.
17
In fact this is true only for a minority of the localities surveyed. In Oltenia, for example, it occurs in
only 24 out of 64 places for a coase, and 25 out of 62 for a t,ese, while elsewhere the ending is -ă. But this
does not mean that the subjunctive has generally ‘resisted’ the change to the first conjugation. As proof,
consider the following: Romanian verbs show a pattern of root alternation, in the third person present
indicative and subjunctive, between ea and e, such that in the first conjugation ea appears in the indicative
and e in the subjunctive (e.g., indicative present pleacă ‘leaves’ versus. subjunctive plece), whilst in other
conjugations the distribution is reversed, with e in the indicative and ea in the subjunctive (e.g., indicative
present crede ‘believes’ versus. subjunctive creadă). Overwhelmingly in the Oltenian dialects (including,
in fact, the dialect of Dobrit,a illustrated above), the root vowel of the third person subjunctive of a t,ese
reflects e, while that of the indicative reflects ea (usually in their centralized variants ă and a), and this
means that the third person subjunctive of this verb is showing distinctively first conjugation morphology.
If its inflectional ending is -ă, this is because the centralization process has actually reapplied to the result
of the morphological change which it originally triggered. For an exploration of the theoretical significance of the implication that the phonological centralization process endures after the morphological
change, see Maiden (2009a).
18
This is not in fact the only example in the history of Romanian dialects in which a historical
centralizing process (of which there have been several, in a varied range of consonantal environments)
has produced an apparent first conjugation ending in the 3SG present, with subsequent shift to the first
conjugation. See Lombard (1955, p. 435f., 1044f.) with regard to reflexes of Latin PLUERE ‘rain’ and
CURRERE ‘flow’.
123
Where does heteroclisis come from?
beyond the scope of this study is why this particular kind of desinential ambiguity—rather than the many others which pervade Romanian grammar (as examination of, for example, Tables 1–5 will show)—should lead to conjugation change:
I certainly cannot find any cases in our dialects where the common 3SG present
ending -e of the non-first conjugation verbs has led to wholesale shifting between
second, third and fourth conjugations. One may say, briefly, that what marks out
3SG present indicative -ă, and imperfect -am (etc.), in our two verbs, from other
forms of desinential ambiguity, is that here we have ‘blur’ in the sense of CarstairsMcCarthy (1994): whereas 3SG present indicative -ă is otherwise uniquely associated with the first conjugation, and -e is a ‘default’ (the desinence for all the other
conjugations), in coasă we have ‘blur’, since the ending is now associated either
with the first conjugation, or with the third. The shift of conjugation is, perhaps,
interpretable as a response to such ‘blur’, involving its elimination by changing the
conjugation class of the verb. While the status of the ‘No Blur Principle’ has
become rather controversial,19 it certainly seems to have value as a tool in the
explanation of the particular conjugation shifts at the origin of our examples of
heteroclisis.20
5 The road to heteroclisis: conjugation shift and morphomic structure
So far I have merely explained why third conjugation a coase and a t,ese have
acquired some first conjugation morphology. I have not explained why the result is
heteroclite, nor why in some dialects the resultant heteroclisis also involves fourth
conjugation morphology, or partial generalization of a novel thematic vowel u.
The heteroclisis we observe is in part, and initially, caused by a conjugation-class
ambiguity located in one part of the paradigm. Subsequent shift of conjugation is a
matter of analogical extension, based on regular first conjugation verbs, which
‘radiates’ from that location to other parts of the paradigm but fails to permeate it
totally. What ultimately determines heteroclisis in the Romanian examples, however, is the arrested intraparadigmatic diffusion of such a change in conjugation
class. What is the nature of the ‘arresting’ factor?
A coase and a t,ese display two ‘lines of defence’ (so to speak) against the spread
of the first conjugation. The first line, as we have seen, limits its diffusion to the
19
See, for example, Stump (2005); Halle and Marantz (2008); but cf. also Enger (2007).
20
I do not mean by this that every case of inflectional ‘blur’ introduced by a sound change necessarily
triggers conjugation shift. For one thing, one can never exclude the possibility that speakers may analyse
phonologically induced apparent blur in purely phonological terms (rather, we have evidence that they
have not done so, when conjugation shift occurs). Moreover, it is possible that the occurrence of such blur
in 3SG.PRES. forms in particular determines conjugation shift: this is certainly the most frequently
occurring (and ‘unmarked’) word-form in the Romanian verb paradigm. There are some grounds for
suspecting that ambiguity in the imperfect may be insufficient, of itself, to trigger a conjugation shift. A
number of fourth conjugation verbs show centralization-triggering root-final consonants in the imperfect,
with the result that imperfects end in -am, rather than expected -eam, almost everywhere in Oltenia (e.g.
auzeám ‘heard’ > auzám) (cf. NALROltenia maps 847 and 848). Most strikingly, there is fourth
conjugation verb a cosi ‘to reap’ whose imperfect is homophonous with that of a coase, namely cosám.
However in neither case is there any sign of conjugation shift (but see also Marin 1991, p. 46).
123
M. Maiden
third person plural present and the third person subjunctive. If there is any further
extension of first conjugation morphology it then meets an almost unassailable
bulwark jointly formed by the preterite, pluperfect and past participle. What one
does not find is systematic penetration of first conjugation morphology into any
subset cell or cells of the group {preterite, pluperfect, past participle}.21 The only
further possibility is for the entire paradigm of the verb to be ‘overrun’: in fact there
is just one place in Oltenia where this final stage is attested, namely Castranova
(point 987), where a coase shifts in its entirety to the first conjugation—although an
alternative past participle in -út is still also recorded.
The role of preterite, pluperfect and past participle, jointly, as a limiting domain22
for intraparadigmatic spread of morphological innovations, is manifest in other
respects, some of them superficially quite different. The fate of Latin CURRERE ‘flow,
run’ in old Romanian is quite parallel to that of a coase in western dialects: this
third conjugation verb was subject to a centralization process with the same
effects as that discussed for a coase, except that this time the conditioning
environment was a preceding /rr/. Zamfir’s documentation (2005, pp. 115–120)
of the development of this verb in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shows
a clear tendency for the shift of the verb to the first conjugation everywhere
except the preterite, pluperfect and past participle. In many Oltenian dialects
and beyond (e.g., NALROltenia map 973; Marin 1991, pp. 46, 50 for Muntenia; Lombard 1955, pp. 738–740) the third conjugation verb a scrie ‘to write’
has been analogically influenced by the irregular verb a s, ti ‘to know’, but the
analogy never operates in preterite, pluperfect or past participle, even though it
could perfectly well have done so. Returning to a coase itself, note the distribution of the allomorphs cos- and cus- in the unstressed initial syllable, both in
the standard language (see Table 7, and Lombard 1955, p. 133), and in many
dialects, for example the Oltenian variety of Sărbătoarea (point 971) (Table 13):
The root cus- occurs only in the preterite, pluperfect and past participle. Given
that the presence of the vowel /u/ is ultimately due to phonetic raising of unstressed
/o/,23 it is curious that the phenomenon should not occur equally in the unstressed
root forms of remaining parts of the paradigm. In part, this blockage of expected
raising seems attributable to the fact that a coase is a third conjugation verb, and
third conjugation verbs are relatively lacking in unstressed roots in comparison with
other conjugations—because, unlike other conjugations, they are root-stressed
21
Of the 98 localities surveyed for NALROltenia, only a few (widely dispersed geographically) show
any sign of acquiring first conjugation morphology in these latter forms: four for a coase, and 11 for a
t,ese. Actually, the meticulous documentation of responses in the Oltenian linguistic atlas allows us to
observe informants (possibly flustered by the bizarre experience of being made to conjugate verbs!)
initially providing first conjugation forms for these parts of the paradigm, only to correct themselves
afterwards in favour of third conjugation forms. In other cases, speakers appear simply to contradict
themselves: there are, for example, several examples of first conjugation past participles, but in every case
speakers supply, in response to other questions also requiring a past participle, a third conjugation form.
22
Either ‘negative’ or ‘positive’. So far we have seen it ‘keeping out’ innovations; we shall see that some
innovations occur just within these cells, but nowhere else in the paradigm.
23
At first glance one might suspect that some kind of assimilation is at work, since /u/ in the root only
occurs before /u/ in the ending. But I find no other evidence for this in the relevant varieties.
123
Where does heteroclisis come from?
Table 13 Root allomorphy in a coase in the dialect of Sărbătoarea
Past participle
Gerund
Infinitive
1SG
2SG
3SG
1PL
2PL
3PL
cusút
0
cosa^nd
cosá
present
cos
cos,
coásă
0
cosă m
cosát,
coásă
imperative
coásă
cosát,
subjunctive
cos
cos,
coáse
0
cosă m
cosát,
coáse
imperfect
cosám
cosái
cosá
cosám
cosát,
cosá
preterite
cusúi
cusús,
cusú
cusúrăm
cusúrăt,
cusúră
pluperfect
cusúsăm
cusúsăi
cusúsă
cusúsăm
cusúsăt,
cusúsă
throughout the present tense, the subjunctive and in the infinitive. But if lack of
raising in a coase can perhaps be ascribed in part to its membership of the third
conjugation and the attendant relative paucity of unstressed roots,24 it is striking that
even in this verb raising does operate, precisely, in the preterite, pluperfect and past
participle. And this observation is all the more remarkable in Oltenian dialects like
that of Crăguies, ti (point 949),25 illustrated in table 14, where there is partial shift to
the first conjugation, and therefore concomitant decline in the incidence of stressed
roots in the present, imperative and subjunctive, yet no change in the paradigmatic
restriction of cus- just to preterite, pluperfect and past participle (see also Lombard
1955, p. 944):
There is yet another major respect in which this subdomain of the paradigm
forms a limiting range for morphological innovation, this time involving person and
number inflections which occur just in that subdomain. Note that since person and
number are not normally indicated on past participles, the past participle will be left
out of consideration here. What we find in the history of Romanian is that a 2SG
ending -s, i, an old Romanian and modern dialectal 2PL ending -tu, and a 3PL ending
-ră, each of which is generally acknowledged to have been limited originally just to
the preterite, later became subject to extension into other synthetic tense forms. The
details and argumentation are set out at length in Maiden (2009b); suffice it here to
say that the most striking characteristic of this extension is that it is overwhelmingly
circumscribed to the preterite and the pluperfect, and also the old conditional—which has died out in the most modern Daco-Romanian varieties, but shared
strong structural ties with the preterite and pluperfect.
Preterite and pluperfect (with the old conditional, introduced above) are more
than just a barrier to the intraparadigmatic spread of morphological innovation.
They also constitute a kind of ‘bond’. It is an inviolate synchronic and historical
generalization about each Romanian verb that the stem of its preterite and pluperfect (and conditional) is always identical. This identity is particularly visible in
second and third conjugation verbs, where stems display a type of allomorphy which
binds together these parts of the verb and distinguishes them from the remainder of
24
For Lombard (1955, 135f.) what is at work here is a wider characteristic of third conjugation verbs,
which in general do not show raising to /u/ in any part of the paradigm, rather than an analogical change
specific to a coase. However that may be, the distributional outcome remains the same.
25
This pattern of distribution of cus- is very common in the northern half of Oltenia. It overlaps with
heteroclite conjugation in at least seven other localities.
123
M. Maiden
Table 14 Distribution of the root allomorphs cos- and cus- in Crăguies, ti
Past participle cusút
0
Gerund
cosa^n
Infinitive
cosá
present imperative subjunctive imperfect preterite
1SG
cos
cos
cosám
cusúi
2SG
cos,
cuásă
cos,
cosái
cusús,
^
3SG
cuásă
cuásă
cosá
cusú
0
0
^
^
1PL
cosă m
cosă m
cosám
cusúrăm
2PL
cosát,
cosát,
cosát,
cosát,
cusúrăt,
3PL
cuásă
cuásă
cosá
cusúră
^
^
pluperfect
cusúsăm
cusúsăi
cusúsă
cusúsăm
cusúsăt,
cusúsă
the paradigm: either there is an idiosyncratic root allomorph, stressed in some parts
of the paradigm, and followed by the thematic vowel /e/, or there is no special root
allomorph but there is a characteristic stressed thematic vowel /u/. The presence of
such a distinctive stem in any one of these tense-forms always and without fail
implies its presence in all the others, and has done so throughout the history of
Romanian in all its attested forms. As examples, the 3SG of verbs a scrie ‘write’, a
r^
ade ‘laugh’, a suge ‘suck’, a fi ‘be’, a putea ‘be able’ (Table 15):
These are Romanian continuants of Latin distinctive perfective (versus imperfective) verb stems: for example present imperfective SCRIBIT, RIDET, SUGIT, EST and
POTEST versus present perfective SCRIPSIT, RISIT, SUXIT, FUIT and POTUIT. Maiden (2000,
2001, 2004a, b, 2007, 2009b) describes the diachronic persistence and coherence
of such structures not just in Romanian but in other Romance languages as
well, despite the loss of any shared coherent meaning among the relevant tense
forms.
But what about the ‘past participle’? We have seen that it stands with the preterite
and pluperfect in defining the domain of resistance to conjugational innovation in a
coase and a t,ese. It does not, however, enjoy a totally inviolate relationship of stemidentity with preterite, pluperfect (and old conditional). There are cases where its
stem is slightly different (e.g., past participles supt and fost corresponding to supse
and fu). None the less, it is overwhelmingly true that the stem of the past participle
is shared with the other tense-forms, even when these have irregular stems: it is
really only the verb a fi, and a small subset of third conjugation verbs in -ce and -ge,
of which this is not true.26
What should be clear is that the conjugation shifts observed in a coase and a t,ese
are sensitive to a major structural cleft within the Romanian verb system, to which a
disparate range of other phenomena (stem allomorphy, vowel raising, distribution of
person-number endings) have been equally sensitive (either positively or negatively), and which is defined and delimited by those tense-forms which were, in
Latin, perfective—in opposition to the remainder of the paradigm. It is my belief
26
One wonders whether it is significant, in this regard, that it is precisely the past participle where one
tends to find the greatest (if still small) number of exceptions to the otherwise general immunity of
preterite + pluperfect + past participle to conjugation shift (see note 21). Equally, it is noteworthy that
just about the only case in which the 3PL ending -ră manages to escape the bounds of preterite and
pluperfect in southern Romanian is when it gets (sporadically) attached to the past participle of analytic
verb forms with third person plural subjects (see Maiden 2009b).
123
Where does heteroclisis come from?
Table 15 Root-allomorphy in Romanian tense-forms
that this array of paradigmatic cells is, and has been throughout the attested history
of Romanian, ‘morphomic’ (in the sense of Aronoff 1994)—in other words, that its
nature is autonomously morphological.
Now there is obviously no possibility of any phonological causation for such a
phonologically disparate set of phenomena; but might there not be a semantic or
functional one? Perfective aspect is certainly no longer the binding factor, since the
Romanian pluperfect does not necessarily indicate completion of the action, and
neither did the old conditional. Preterite and perfective are both past tenses, but so is
the imperfect (while the old conditional had future time reference). A better candidate for a shared and distinctive factor uniting preterite and pluperfect might be
‘anteriority’ (the preterite is anterior to the time of utterance, and the pluperfect is
anterior to a reference point in the past). Here again, however, there are awkward
discrepancies: the primary function of the Romanian preterite is to express completed actions in the past, and the fact that it is associated with anteriority with
respect to the present is simply a secondary effect of its being a past tense. In
contrast, the pluperfect is fundamentally associated with the indication of anteriority:27 if a pluperfect is used, it implies and requires an event or action in the
narrative at some subsequent point in the past. As it happens, the Oltenian preterite
has acquired a further and rather remarkable characteristic distinguishing it from the
pluperfect, that of expressing ‘hodiernality’: it is the exponent of perfective past
events which have occurred today, while other past perfective events are expressed
using the analytic perfect (auxiliary + past participle): thus, from Belot,u (Cazacu
1967, p. 310): Pe z^iua di ieri am foz la t^irgu de afară c-um porc. L-am-vı̂ndut
bine frumos […] Ast^
az de dimineat,^
a mă sculai s, i io, mă spălai…. Literally:
‘Yesterday I have been to the outdoor market with a pig. I have sold it very nicely.
This morning I got up too, I washed…’. This novel characteristic of the Oltenian
preterite is absent however from the pluperfect, which does not inherently
mean ‘today from the point of view of a reference point in the past’. In other
words, preterite and pluperfect are perfectly capable of idisoyncratic functional
27
But see also Marin (2005–2007, pp. 106–111).
123
M. Maiden
differentiation, yet their stems remain inviolably united, and they serve as a
coherent block in cases of conjugation change.
All this is by way of saying that what, in the case of a coase and a t,ese (in our
dialects, and in various other Romanian verbs), is regulating the spread of a change
of inflectional class, and thereby giving rise to heteroclisis, is of a purely morphological nature, being defined by the characteristic formal opposition between the
stems of the preterite, pluperfect, old conditional and past participle, on the one
hand, and those of the present, imperative, subjunctive, imperfect, gerund and
infinitive, on the other.28 Yet this is not the only kind of morphomic pattern at work
in our examples of heteroclisis.
I observed above that all dialects showing heteroclisis in our two verbs have in
common the extension of first conjugation morphology to the 3PL present and into
the third person present subjunctive. In some dialects (especially those of Banat and
Crisß ana; see also the example from Dobritßa in northern Oltenia, in table 12 above),
this is as far as the extension of first conjugation morphology gets.29 Note that it is
not the case that all present forms, or all subjunctive forms, or all third person forms
receive first conjugation morphology. In other words, it is not the case that the
conjugation shift is aligned with any coherent sets of morphosyntactic properties.
Rather, what emerges is an idiosyncratic, morphomic, pattern of distribution, in
which the third person forms of the present and of the subjunctive show first
conjugation morphology, and the first and second persons singular present and
subjunctive are not distinct from the first conjugation, while the first and second
persons plural present and subjunctive, with virtually the whole of the rest of the
paradigm, have non-first conjugation morphology. This distributional pattern, in
multiple guises, is a recurrent feature in the history not only of Romanian but of
virtually all Romance languages (see Maiden 2004a, b, c, 2005, 2007). It is a pattern
created, in the distant past, by vocalic alternation in the lexical root caused by stress
or its absence (see, for example, the alternation between forms in /o/ and those in /u/
in table 3); it is the domain of distribution for the ‘augments’ encountered in
nearly all fourth conjugation verbs and many first conjugation verbs, as described in
Table 5; it is even a locus of incursive suppletion for certain verbs in Romanian and
other Romance languages. Perhaps most significantly, from our point of view, it is
also the domain, this time in the standard language and most Daco-Romanian
dialects, of another kind of heteroclisis, with very similar origins.
It is widely observable in the history of Romanian that original /(r)r/, like /s/ in
Oltenia, also had a centralizing effect on front vowels. The effects are particularly
apparent in modern Romanian fourth conjugation verbs of Slav origin, such as a
28
This is the place to mention yet another ‘morphomic’ dimension to our analysis. Romanian verbs all
have a ‘supine’, a kind of verbal noun, which is almost everywhere identical in form to the masculine
singular of the past participle, despite a complete lack of common function (but see Zwanenburg 1999 for
an attempt—to my mind unpersuasive—to argue against this view). The sole exceptions known to me
involve the verb ‘to be’ in a small cluster of Transylvanian dialects. I do not have direct information on
the supines of a coase and a t,ese, but we may be fairly confident that they are just like the past participles
in resisting first conjugation morphology.
29
There is, of course, apparent first conjugation morphology in the imperfect, but this is the result of the
phonological centralization process, and not a matter of morphological extension.
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Where does heteroclisis come from?
cobor^ı ‘to go down’ or a omor^ı ‘to kill’ (cf. Iordan 1935; Lombard 1955,
pp. 750–752; Schulte 2005), where the original thematic vowel i has become ^a (also
spelled ^i), the diphthong ea of the imperfect becomes a, and e (for example, the 3SG
present inflection) becomes ă. This means that an apparent first conjugation ending
emerges in the 3SG present (and the imperfect). Throughout Romanian dialects, the
morphological effect of this change has been parallel to what we observe for a coase
and a t,ese in western Romania: first conjugation morphology is also introduced into
3PL present and the third person present subjunctive, and the 2SG imperative.30 The
rest of the verb retains fourth conjugation morphology (albeit with the centralized
vowels). In fact, this type of distribution also appears in some other fourth conjugation verbs, such as a acoperi31 ‘to cover’, a descoperi ‘to discover’, a suferi ‘to
suffer’, a sprijini ‘to support’, and in some varieties a curăt,i ‘to clean’ and a g^adili
‘to tickle’ (see Lombard 1955, 746f.). In these cases32 the development is clearly
analogical on the pattern of first/fourth conjugation heteroclisis illustrated above,
and perhaps reflect a kind of ‘compromise’ between competing assignment of these
verbs33 to the two dominant productive conjugations.
To recapitulate, a large number of outwardly disparate phenomena show the very
same distributional pattern that characterizes the most common domain of extension
of first conjugation morphology encountered in western Romanian a coase and a
t,ese. This is a morphomic pattern comprising the singular and third person forms of
the present and of the subjunctive, and the second person singular imperative. If (as
is usually the case in Oltenia) first conjugation morphology then percolates outside
this domain, it is likely to prove sensitive to yet another morphomic structure, that
characterizing preterite, pluperfect and past participle.
30
The verb a cobor^ı has a particular significance in this respect which has not, to my knowledge, ever
been remarked upon by historical morphologists of Romanian. It is a characteristic of Romanian first
conjugation verbs that their 2SG imperative is always syncretic with the third person present (e.g., c^antă
‘sing!’ ¼ 3SG/PL PRES. c^antă); outside the first conjugation a curious principle obtains, such that
transitive imperatives show identity with the 3SG present (e.g., pune ‘put!’ ¼ 3SG.PRES pune
2SG.PRES pui), while intransitve imperatives show identity with the 2SG.PRES (e.g., răm^ai
‘stay!’ ¼ 2SG.PRES răm^ai 3SG.PRES răm^ane). Crucially, a cobor^ı, while an intransitive verb, has a
2SG imperative identical to the 3SG.PRES—clear evidence that what has happened is a shift to first
conjugation membership. A similar case is presented by the intransitive a tăbăr^ı ‘to inveigh (against
someone)’.
31
Moreover, there is some evidence for further transition of the verb a acoperi into the first conjugation,
as suggested by ALRII map 1961, point 2, which also has 1PL acupărăm, 2PL acupărat,i, with
unambiguously first conjugation endings.
32
Lombard (1955, 753f.) observes that it is possible that original /r/, as well as /rr/, produced a
centralizing effect in the 3SG present of certain of these verbs. However, their imperfects are not affected:
cf. acopeream, not *acoperam.
33
A curăt,i is derived from the adjective curat ‘clean’, a g^adili is apparently from Turkish, while the
etymology of a sprijini is obscure. For most Romanians, nowadays, the first two verbs belong squarely in
the first conjugation.
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M. Maiden
6 Fourth conjugation forms, and thematic u
The discussion in Sect. 5 was primarily about how, and why, a coase and a t,ese
developed first conjugation morphology in part of their paradigm. But the fact is that
virtually everywhere where the shift to the first conjugation affected only the singular and plural forms of the present and the subjunctive, with the 2SG imperative,
there were further conjugation class adjustments elsewhere in the paradigm. It still
has to be explained why in Crisß ana the remaining parts of the paradigm acquired
fourth conjugation morphology, and how the mysterious u, principally in the Banat,
managed to insinuate itself into those same parts of the paradigm.
Part of the answer, as far as Crisß ana is concerned, is that speakers have analogically followed the model provided by that class of originally fourth conjugation
verbs which had acquired partial first conjugation morphology, in the way I have
described for standard Romanian in Sect. 5. But why would speakers have taken this
further step at all (rather than just leaving the remaining original third conjugation
morphology undisturbed) and why, once again, would speakers in the Banat have
introduced their u? My answer is along the following lines. The third conjugation is
a closed and unproductive class, unlike the first and the fourth. In a coase and a t,ese
speakers found themselves confronted with an aberrant and lexically isolated subpattern of third conjugation morphology, in that the expected signs of third conjugation membership in the present tense, in the subjunctive and in the 2SG
imperative (not to mention the imperfect) were no longer there, having been usurped
by first conjugation forms. This anomaly was resolved, at least in Crisß ana, by
assigning the verbs to a type where heteroclisis was in fact already established,
namely that subclass of verbs in which first and fourth conjugation forms were
conflated. The emergence of the u in the Banat looks suggestively similar: the
conclusion is almost irresistible that this vowel originates in the historically regular
u of the preterite, pluperfect and past participle, and that its generalization is
modelled on the distribution of the thematic vowel i in fourth conjugation verbs (see
Table 2). It is as if we are dealing with a kind of compromise between adopting the
existing pattern associated with first/fourth conjugation heteroclisis, on the one
hand, and retaining a marker of third conjugation membership (u), on the other. The
paradoxical result is at once unprecedented34 and lexically idiosyncratic (in effect a
novel, perhaps only one or two-member, conjugation class), yet very familiar, since
it conforms perfectly to general distributional patterns associated with thematic
vowels in the fourth (and, for that matter, the first) conjugation.
34
Or almost. We get a curious glimpse of something similar in the standard Romanian imprecation
Bătú-te-ar sfintßii!, literally ‘The saints would beat you!’. The conditional construction exemplified here is
one in which one would normally expect an infinitive (there is also archaic enclisis of the object pronoun
and the conditional auxiliary ar). Except that the infinitive of ‘to beat’ is (third conjugation) báte, and no
Romanian infinitive ends in -ú: what we ought to get is Báte-te-ar sfintßii! The history of this expression is
obscure to me, but it looks possible that we have a kind of ‘dissimilatory’ rejection of the expected
repetition [te te], and that in their search for a substitute form of infinitive, speakers have adopted the
device of generalizing the postradical vowel of the preterite, pluperfect and past participle.
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Where does heteroclisis come from?
7 Implications and provisional conclusion
What was already clear from Stump’s broad-ranging comparative study and has
become, I hope, even more so from my diachronic investigation of Romanian, is
that heteroclisis is not a phenomenon which morphologists should have been
ignoring. We have seen one route by which heteroclisis can emerge in a language:
inflection-class ambiguity arising in a subpart of the inflectional paradigm of some
lexeme leads to a change of inflection class elsewhere in its paradigm; this shift is,
however, blocked in some parts of the paradigm, and the result is heteroclisis. The
blocking factor, in the Romanian cases, involves morphomically defined sets of
cells which have recurrently played a role in defining the domain of morphological
changes, principally those involving patterns of stem allomorphy. Such findings
clearly support Stump’s observation that heteroclisis is structured and systematic,
and not merely arbitrary and lexically stipulated. From my diachronic evidence, the
distribution of heteroclisis is no idiosyncratic accident, but clearly correlated with
major organizational properties of the Romanian verb paradigm.
Stump’s study is not diachronically oriented, but he does describe (2006, 290f.)
the relation between the inflection classes co-present in heteroclisis in terms of
‘intrusiveness’, one class being ‘intrusive’ with respect to another. So a preliminary
question one might want to ask is whether that synchronic distinction could also
have diachronic relevance. For Stump the ‘intrusive’ class is generally expected to
correspond to the presence of a more ‘marked’ morphosyntactic property in its set of
cells,35 except that
‘If (i) there is some nonempty morphosyntactic property set s such that all and
only cells in [a heteroclite content paradigm] P containing an extension of s
belong to SC
but
(ii) there is no nonempty morphosyntactic property set s¢ such that all and only
cells in P containing an extension of s¢ belong to SD36
then C is an intrusive class in P.’
In fact I do not detect any correlation between the Romanian data and such distinctions. The diachronic ‘intruder’ in Romanian is very clearly the first conjugation,
but it (at least initially) occupies what are surely the least ‘marked’ set of cells in the
verb system, associated with number (singular), person (third) and tense (present).37
And none of the sets of cells implicated displays a morphosyntactic property set
such that all and only cells containing that property set belong to that set: this much
35
‘[An inflectional class] C is an intrusive class in [a heteroclite content paradigm] P if the cell
containing the least marked morphosyntactic property set belongs to [the set of cells belonging to
inflection class D].’
36
SC and SD being defined as the set of cells inflected as members of, respectively, inflection class C and
inflectional class D.
37
Note that this does not mean that its ‘morphomic’ distribution can be reduced to a matter of ‘markedness’, because the particular combination and intersection of parameters selected remains idiosyncratic
and arbitrary. For example, give that 2PL is probably more ‘marked’ than 1PL, why does the dividing line
for heteroclisis not run between them?
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M. Maiden
is, of course, implicit in the arguments I have set out that the domain of heteroclisis
in Romanian is morphomic.
A more substantial difference between Stump’s data and mine regards the distinction he makes between ‘cloven’ and ‘fractured’ heteroclite paradigms. In cloven
paradigms, the ‘split’ is absolutely correlated with some morphosyntactic property
(e.g., number, in the distinction between the ‘soft’ masculine declension singular
versus ‘hard’ masculine declension plural of Czech nouns such as PRAMEN ‘spring’).
In ‘fractured’ heteroclisis, in contrast, there is lack of perfect alignment between the
distribution of the inflection classes and any morphosyntactic property, and to the
extent that some incidence of heteroclisis is ‘fractured’ (hence not morphosyntactically conditioned), it is also purely morphologically conditioned. Stump seeks
to constrain fractured heteroclisis by proposing, in effect, that the correlates of
fractured heteroclisis must be a subset of the correlates of cloven heteroclisis,
wherever the latter also exists (2006, p. 314):
What one apparently does not find are languages in which cloven paradigms
and fractured paradigms coexist in some syntactic category and in which some
fractured paradigms in that category have minimal intersective correlates none
of which appears as an absolute correlate in any cloven paradigm of that
category.
Stump further observes that in the cases of fractured heteroclisis he examines, the
deviation of the ‘fractured’ from the ‘cloven’ pattern tends to be minimal. The
implication of his survey is that the fractured variety tends to presuppose, and to
conform closely to, cloven heteroclisis, although he acknowledges the possibility
that fractured heteroclisis could exist independently of the cloven type, and cautiously alludes to one ‘apparent’ example of this, in Chukchi.
What is particularly distinctive about all the examples of heteroclisis I have
found in Romanian and Romanian dialects is that none of them is ‘cloven’; they are
not aligned within any morphosyntactic property set. Prima facie, Romanian has
only fractured heteroclisis. And yet the Romanian examples are beautifully ‘cloven’, precisely from a purely morphological perspective: they are aligned not with
any morphosyntactic content, but with at least one, and often two, major and
recurrent morphomic patterns principally manifested in stem-alternation.
One possible interpretation of all this might be that in cases of ‘fractured-notcloven’ heteroclisis, the set of cells implicated will always (at least in origin) be one
also implicated in some other pattern of stem alternation, whereas ‘fractured-aswell-as-cloven’ heteroclisis will always be predominantly associated with morphosyntactic conditioning. However, such a dichotomy seems unappealing, and we
should explore the possibility that both cloven and fractured heteroclisis may be
treated in a unified fashion. A possibility implied both by Stump’s findings and by
mine, and deserving of investigation by detailed historical examination of a broad
sweep of typological data of the kind marshalled by Stump, is that the ‘fracturedonly’ variety might represent the tip of an iceberg largely submerged under the
waters of apparent ‘morphosyntactic’ conditioning. To put the issue in more
prosaic terms, it is that the emergence of heteroclisis might generally involve
sensitivity not to morphosyntactic conditioning, but simply to characteristic and
123
Where does heteroclisis come from?
language-specific distributional patterns of stem alternation. Obviously, these will,
in turn, very often be aligned with morphosyntactic properties, but the question is
whether such alignment is directly or necessarily relevant to the distribution of
heteroclisis. After all, conjugation classes, in Romance languages at least, are never
distinctively correlated with any distinct semantic or morphosyntactic property.
That in heteroclisis conjugation classes should be initially sensitive to purely formal
alternation within the paradigm, rather than to morphosyntactic properties (if any)
correlated with that alternation, has perhaps a measure of initial plausibility.
Stump says of morphologically conditioned heteroclisis (2006:295) that it generally involves ‘rules of paradigm linkage that […] define an independent pattern of
stem alternation whose incidence does not always involve heteroclisis’ [my
emphasis]. He also argues (2006, p. 316) that ‘[i]f a heteroclite lexeme belongs to a
privileged syntactic category, then a privileged inflectional category participates in
conditioning the juxtaposition of inflection classes in its paradigm’. The definition of
‘privileged inflectional category’ is elaborated (2006, 318f.) as ‘one serving as an
absolute correlate of either heteroclisis or simple stem alternation […]. Under this
revised definition, an instance of simple stem alternation may suffice to establish an
inflectional category as privileged’ [my emphasis]. When we see that he also says
(2006, p. 282) of his prime example of cloven heteroclite inflection that ‘[p]resumably
the heteroclite inflection of Czech PRAMEN also once involved an alternation in stem
form’, it is difficult to escape the impression that the emergence of heteroclisis
might be not so much correlated with stem alternation, as primarily aligned with
it, any correlation with morphosyntactic properties being secondary.
To test whether it is true that heteroclisis always follows existing patterns of stem
alternation would, of course, require a much larger comparative and historical study
than is permitted by the still small amount of information that we have. I can say
that a preliminary38 survey of another set of Romance varieties independently
displaying heteroclisis, namely Romansh (spoken in the Graubünden region of
southern Switzerland), shows data consistent with this prediction. Here, the penetration of fourth conjugation endings into some third conjugation verbs closely
follows the distribution of a major pattern of stem-allomorphy originally caused by
stress, in which the forms of the infinitive, and the singular and third person of the
present indicative and the subjunctive39 are marked off from the rest of the paradigm (in a way similar to that described above for Romanian); in this case this set of
forms serve to block the conjugational innovation (cf. Spescha 1989, pp. 461-464;
Arquint 1964) (Tables 16, 17).
38
The origins of this particular type of heteroclisis are less clear than in the Romanian case. Whether
‘blur’, rather than simple inflectional ambiguity, is at issue here depends on some rather delicate questions
of chronology.
39
Like other dialects of this area, stress, and the allomorphs historically associated with it, are found
throughout the present subjunctive.
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M. Maiden
Table 16 Heteroclisis in Engadine Romansh (after Arquint 1964)
Third conjugation
Infinitive
Gerund
Past participle
1SG
2SG
3SG
1PL
2PL
3PL
Fourth conjugation
Infinitive
Gerund
Past particple
1SG
2SG
3SG
1PL
2PL
3PL
scriver ‘write’
scrivond
scrit
pres. ind.
scriv
scrivast
scriva
scrivain
scrivaivat
scrivan
finir ‘end’
finind
fini
pres. ind.
finisch
finischast
finischa
finin
finivat
finischan
imperative
scriva
scrivai
imperative
finischa
fini
pres. subj.
scriva
scrivast
scriva
scrivan
scrivat
scrivan
imperfect
scrivaiva
scrivaivast
scrivaiva
scrivaivan
scrivaivat
scrivaivan
imperfect subj.
scrivess
scrivessast
scrivessa
scrivessan
scrivessat
scrivessan
pres. subj.
finischa
finischast
finischa
finischan
finischat
finischan
imperfect
finiva
finivast
finiva
finivan
finivat
finivan
imperfect subj.
finiss
finissast
finissa
finissan
finissat
finissan
Table 17 Heteroclite introduction of fourth conjugation forms into a third conjugation verb:
Infinitive
Gerund
Past participle
1SG
2SG
3SG
1PL
2PL
3PL
cuorrer‘run’
currind/currond
curri/cuors
pres. ind.
cuor
cuorrast
cuorra
currin
currivat
cuorran
imperative
cuorra
curri
pres. subj.
cuorra
cuorrast
cuorra
cuorran
cuorrat
cuorran
imperfect
curriva
currivast
curriva
currivan
currivat
currivan
imperfect subj.
curriss
currissast
currissa
currissan
currissat
currissan
The following example (Table 17) shows both the typical pattern of stem allomorphy, and how the introduction of fourth conjugation morphology (underlined)
coincides40 with it.
The prediction that heteroclisis follows stem alternation is, then, worth exploring,
given my data which clearly confirm that heteroclisis can be associated directly with
patterns of stem alternation, without morphosyntactic conditioning. It is easy to see
what one would need to find in order to invalidate this hypothesis: a language in
which the paradigmatic distribution of heteroclisis at its inception did not correspond to any pattern of stem alternation.41 Imagine, for example, a language with
40
Not quite perfectly: the future and conditional, not illustrated here, have remained resistant to the
innovation. Needless to say, such heteroclisis is not limited to verbs which already have the vocalic
alternation.
41
This also implies that if a language had no stem alternation it could have no heteroclisis.
123
Where does heteroclisis come from?
conjugation classes and in whose verbs aspect and tense are inflectionally distinguished, but in which there is only one pattern of stem alternation, which is always
associated with aspect, never with tense. The prediction is then that any heteroclisis
emerging in this language would have to be—apparently—aligned with aspect and
that it could not be aligned with tense, simply because heteroclisis must (it is
predicted) follow stem alternation. If heteroclisis actually followed tense, the prediction would be clearly wrong.
From the diachronic perspective which principally interests me here, the typological distinction between ‘cloven’ and ‘fractured’ is justified only if it is the case
that heteroclisis can be directly sensitive, in origin, to purely morphosyntactic
distinctions, without the intermediacy of stem alternation. The data I have presented
confirm, at the very least, that ‘fractured’ heteroclisis need not be secondary to
morphosyntactically conditioned heteroclisis, and that existing patterns of stem
alternation—rather than any ‘morphosyntactic conditioning’—may play a primary
role in the genesis of the phenomenon. The extent of that role is a matter for broader
cross-linguistic historical exploration.
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