Les terminacions àtones de primera i segona persona del plural en català. Una aproximació diacrònica i geolingüística

Abstract

One of the characteristic evolutions of Catalan, as opposed to other Romance languages, is the A > [e] closure in unstressed final syllables if they are closed by a consonant (RŎSAS > roses ‘roses’, CANTANT > canten ‘they sing’, ASPARĂGU > espàrrec ‘asparagus’). Despite this, in North- Western Catalan, there are variants of first and second person plural unstressed endings of the imperfect indicative and conditional tenses that seem to restrict the scope of the aforementioned closure (cantàvem [kan'taβam] ‘we sang’, cantaríeu [kanta'ɾiaw] ‘youplural would sing’). In this paper, on the basis of a corpus recorded in forty North-Western survey points, we delimit the area in which unstressed verb endings derived from Latin -AMUS, -ATIS have arrived to a result

other than -em, -eu. Next, with the help of linguistic data mapped in Atles Linguistic del Domini Català (ALDC), and searching the Corpus Informatitzat del Català Antic (CICA), we discard the possibility that these North-Western variants could be explained in strictly phonetic terms. Finally, within the framework of the Natural Morphology Theory, we provide an explanation for the changes in unstressed first and second person plural endings, starting from the conversion of allophonic variants into true allomorphs, thanks to the redistribution of which within tenses paradigms a greater congruence on the verbal system is obtained.