Abstract

COLACO, Maria João  and  CARDEIRA, Esperança. Menço ou minto? Regularization of verbal paradigms. Diacrítica [online]. 2013, vol.27, n.1, pp.69-94. ISSN 0807-8967.

The changes suffered by the verbs in Portuguese occurred in different periods of the history originating often irregularities in the verbal paradigm. The main objective of this article is to study a group of special pattern verbs which present a particular lexeme for the first person singular present indicative and all the present subjunctive forms that distinguish themselfs from the other tenses: SENTIO > senço, ARDEO > arço, AUDIO > ouço, MENTIO > menço, PETIO > peço, PERDO (*PERDEO) > perço. However, each one of these verbs evolved independently, not showing the same characteristics. This study aims to determine the phenomena involved in the evolution of these verbal forms and to investigate within which epoch was variation registred, analysing each one of the pertinent forms. In order to ascertain these questions, corpora constituted by archaic Portuguese written documents were used.

Keywords : variation; change; analogy; verbal morphology.

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