MorphoMO workshop in Montreal
At the beginning of May, Professor Neil Myler presented at MorphoMO, a workshop in Montreal. His talk was titled “The Spanish PYTA morphome dissolved”.
He writes,
“Many Romance languages exhibit a morphomic pattern dubbed PYTA (for {perfecto/pretérito} y tiempos afines—see especially Maiden 2018: Ch 4). Spanish exhibits a striking instance of this phenomenon. No matter how irregular a Spanish verb is otherwise, it always has the same stem for both imperfect subjunctive paradigms and for the future subjunctive (which is defunct in the modern spoken language, but was in active use a few centuries ago), and this stem can be unerringly arrived at by taking the 3rd person plural preterite indicative form of the verb and subtracting the sequence -ron. This generalization is exceptionless, but it is not directly formulable in a piece-based view of morphology. For this reason, the PYTA morphome has been suggested to require a paradigm-based view of morphology (see for instance O’Neill 2014).
In this talk, I will argue that the PYTA morphome, at least as it arises in Spanish, is actually two independent generalizations wearing a trench coat. One of these generalizations involves morphosyntactic conditioning of root suppletion by a feature [-Pres], the other is phonological and concerns the circumstances under which the theme vowel of 2nd and 3rd conjugation verbs diphthongizes. Once these generalizations are independently explained (as they have to be, since they each affect different parts of the paradigm which extend beyond the claimed morphomic pattern), there is no work left for a direct statement of the morphomic pattern to do, and thus no threat to piece-based models of morphology from this quarter.”
Congrats to Professor Myler!