A new online database, that has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), examines why irregular verbs are learned by successive generations despite ‘making no sense’ or, apparently, having any function in the language.
This historical study of the development of irregular verbs in the hundreds of Romance languages including French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Catalan has revealed how these structures survive. Developed by a team at Oxford University, the online database displays the irregularities of the verb systems of 80 Romance languages and dialects - those that developed from Latin - to highlight the research. The database is useful to specialists and others with an interest in Romance languages
This Database has been constructed in connection with the AHRC-funded research project Autonomous Morphology in Diachrony: comparative evidence from the Romance languages, carried out at Oxford University first in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, and latterly in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, between October 2006 and December 2010.
Professor Martin Maiden of Oxford’s Faculty of Linguistics Philology & Phonetics and the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages led the project.
He said: ‘Many people will remember groaning at school when faced with irregular French or Spanish verbs and wondering why they were the way they were. Our work helps to explain why they, and their equivalents in many related languages, not only exist but are even reinforced and replicated over time.’
There is usually a good historical reason why irregularities appear in a language, Professor Maiden adds, but often the original causes disappear, leaving behind apparently inexplicable irregularities.
Professor Maiden believes that the Romance languages provide ‘an extraordinarily rich and detailed field for the study of how and why language changes’.
‘Our research has opened up numerous new avenues of investigation, which we are already actively pursuing, and has shown that many Romance varieties too often neglected in mainstream Romance linguistics (such as Romanian or the French spoken on the Atlantic coast of Canada) have fascinating properties which we want to explore further.’
The database can be accessed here: http://romverbmorph.clp.ox.ac.uk/
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AHRC Media contact: Jake Gilmore, Communications Manager, 01793 416021; j.gilmore@ahrc.ac.uk
Notes to Editors:
The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC): Each year the AHRC provides approximately £100 million from the Government to support research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities, from languages and law, archaeology and English literature to design and creative and performing arts. In any one year, the AHRC makes hundreds of research awards ranging from individual fellowships to major collaborative projects as well as over 1,100 studentship awards. Awards are made after a rigorous peer review process, to ensure that only applications of the highest quality are funded. The quality and range of research supported by this investment of public funds not only provides social and cultural benefits but also contributes to the economic success of the UK.
Database of the Inflectional Morphology of the Romance Verb -
This Database has been constructed in connection with the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research project Autonomous Morphology in Diachrony: comparative evidence from the Romance languages (AH/D503396/1), carried out at Oxford University first in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, and latterly in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, between October 2006 and December 2010.
The Database offers a representation of the inflectional paradigms of the verb for some 80 Romance varieties. The data may be viewed by language variety, by lexical verb (labelled by etymon), by grammatical category, or by combinations thereof. http://romverbmorph.clp.ox.ac.uk/