Latin verbal morphology and the diachronic development of its thematic and athematic constructions

Abstract

This paper investigates the verbal morphology of Latin in terms of the theoretical framework of Distributed Morphology (DM). In addition to providing a synchronic analysis of the verbal system of Latin, this paper discusses the development of the thematic vowel system and of athematic perfect forms in this language from their reconstructed Proto-Indo-European (PIE) antecedents and demonstrates the role of morpho-syntactic structure in constraining the historic analyses, and specifically the role that morpho-syntactic locality played in this historical development. It will be shown that despite radical changes in the exponence, the morpho-syntax and the semantics, of the verbal forms, the (local) structural relation between roots as the repositories of idiosyncratic morphological information and aspectual morphemes displaying special (irregular) exponents was consistently preserved across the millennia.