Autonomous morphology and extramorphological coherence
Résumé
Although the most familiar examples of autonomously morphological phenomena are entirely arbitrary, Aronoff’s original (1994) proposal predicts that autonomous morphology is not limited to such cases, but is active in all mappings between phonology and morphosyntax, from morphological phenomena considered entirely arbitrary, to morphological phenomena which are to some degree correlated with extramorphological features. In this study I discuss evidence from Romance verb morphology for the existence of such a continuum, and explore approaches to situating morphological phenomena along it, from the starting point of the ‘hierarchy of functional coherence’ (a ranking of morphomes according to the degree to which they correspond to extramorphological criteria) put forward by Smith (2013). I suggest that it is worthwhile to distinguish between the phonological, morphosyntactic and morphosemantic coherence of a given morphome, firstly because these are qualitatively different phenomena, and secondly because phonological correlates appear to make a greater contribution to diachronic resilience.