ON ROOT STRUCTURE AND THE DESTINY OF THE LATIN SECOND CONJUGATION

Abstract

Latin had four (morphological) conjugation classes of verbs, distinguished in the infinitive form by their theme vowel: the first with [a:] (clama.re 'to call'), the second, and numerically smallest, with [e:] (yideire 'to see'), the third with [e] (spargere 'to scatter'), and the fourth with [i:] (yeni:re 'to come')· The second and third conjugation infmitives differed both by the length of their theme vowel and by the placement of primary stress (since stress placement was quantity-sensitive). When distinctive vowel length was lost in the passage from Latin to the Romance languages, the second and third conjugation infmitives were distinguished only by the placement of stress. Today, while the modern Romance languages (with the exception of Spanish and Portuguese) have maintained a special conjugation class (we call it the Special Class) for a small number of verbs from the historical second conjugation, most of the verbs of the historical second switched conjugation class, going primarily (but not exclusively) into the same class s descendants of the historical third conjugation. In this paper we compare two competing accounts of why certain verbs stayed in the Special Class and others switched conjugation classes, concluding in favor of the first. We do not consider verbs that were lost in the passage from Latin into Romance.