The French i-Conjugation from a Diachronic Perspective

Topic and scope of the paper This paper proposes a sketch of how /sk/, a Latin suffix of word formation, developed into an inflectional stem-extension in the French i-conjugation. I will try to show how an understanding of inflectional classes as sets of properties and implications in the line of Wurzel (1984) and Dressler et al. (2003) can be used to reconstruct this process. Moreover, a hypothesis will be proposed regarding the role of lexical storage in morphological change. The paper is organized as follows: In section 1, I shortly address the general assumptions I am making about inflectional morphology. The topics are: morphological vs. phonological variation of word-forms, the concept of inflectional class as applied to the French i-conjugation, the relative lexical weight of inflectional classes, multiple class membership, the assignment of inflectional class membership, and inflectional classes as features. In section 2, I will give an outline of the evolution of /sk / during the Latin period. In section 3, I will first discuss the question of why /sk / could survive after the loss of its meaning and then propose a sketch of the lexical evolution of i-verbs from Old to Modern French