The Romance gerund and 'system-dependent naturalness' in morphology

As a fortuitous result of sound change, a small handful of Romance verbs acquired doubly disparate patterns of allomorphy in their root: the phonological details of the resulting alternants were often quite different from verb to verb, and characterized a disjunct and highly 'unnatural' class of morphosyntactic properties, most commonly the gerund, the present subjunctive, and the first person singular present. Despite the rare and idiosyncratic nature of these alternation patterns, they have sometimes been subject to extensive analogical generalizations, disrupting previously invariant verb roots, and defying the intuition, expounded within some varieties of 'Natural' morphological theory, that such violations of biuniqueness in the form-meaning relationship could only occur when an 'unnatural' morphological phenomenon happens to be quantitatively predominant (and thus 'locally natural') within a grammar. The Romance facts suggest that principles of 'local' and 'universal' naturalness are both subject to a superordinate principle of 'stability' in form-meaning relationships. © The Philological Society 1996.