On the development of Latin -sk- to French and Italian : Lexicalization, reanalysis and spreading

Abstract

The author aims at giving a coherent interpretation of the well-studied emergence of a new inflectional class in French and Italian. A distinction is made between two complementary kinds of explanation: strong explanations, which involve assumptions about mental representations and their variation, and weak explanations, which contextualize given changes with respect to other changes and preceding stages of the language. The strong explanations proposed here rest upon assumptions about the mental lexicon: lexical storage, inertia and reanalysis of lexical representations, competition of direct lexical access with morphological analysis, the dynamics of and the resistance against paradigmatic and lexical spreading. Weak explanations comprise, among others, the decline of the Latin system of inflectional classes and the emergence of Romance patterns of stem variation.