The Morphological and Syntactic Status of the Analytic and Synthetic Future in Medieval Catalan

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to investigate the morphological and syntactic properties of the synthetic and analytic future in medieval Catalan. The main claim is that the two future forms are independent structures. Despite their shared historical origin, they are not synchronically derived from a common syntactic structure. Both forms are words and, while the synthetic future is a word form consisting of a stem and inflectional affixes, like other verb forms, the analytic future is a compound consisting of an infinitive, a clitic cluster, and a bound auxiliary. The presence of socalled clitics in the analytic future is consistent with the claim that the analytic future is a word, if we assume the affixal status of clitics in medieval Catalan, an assumption that is supported by abundant evidence. The analysis of the analytic future as a compound shows that compounding, though generally found in lexeme-formation, is a morphological device that can be used to derive word forms in an inflectional paradigm.