Explanation in morphophonemics: Changes in provençal and Spanish preterite forms

The degree of autonomy of a word is the extent to which a word is likely to have its own lexical representation. Autonomy is determined by semantic complexity, word frequency, and morphophonemic irregularity, such that the semantically simpler, more frequent, and more irregular words are more autonomous. In morphological systems, nonautonomous words are derived from autonomous words by rule. Dynamic data from psycholinguistics and diachrony are presented in support of this hypothesis. The diachronic discussion centers around the person forms of the preterite in Provencal and Spanish, where the third singular and the first singular are the most autonomous. There is considerable dialectal evidence that one or both of these forms can serve as the morphophonemic base(s) from which the other person forms of the preterite are derived.

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