Past Participles from Latin to Romance (review)

Trying to compensate for the more or less general lack of attention paid to past participial morphology in Romance linguistics, Laurent offers a sketch of the Latin system of past participle formation and a review of its evolution in time and space across Romania.

His study begins with a description of the origins of past participles in Classical Latin in one type of verbal adjective from Indo-European and of the outcomes of such verbal adjectives, i.e. heritage and innovation, in some ancient and modern Indo-European languages. He presents the past participial system as constituted in Classical Latin, also describing the whole perfectum system, and deals with the reshaping and continuation of that system in Late Latin or Proto-Romance. His main purpose is to determine which types of Classical Latin past participles survived into Romance and why. It seems that arrhizotonic past participles with stress on their theme vowels were preferred in Late Latin, while rhizotonic types of past participles, bearing root stress, became fewer across most of Romania. Eastern Romance proves an inclination towards rhizotonic past participles whereas western Romance tends to generalize arrhizotonic forms.

Based on corpora from Daco-Romanian, Aromanian, Meglenoromanian, Istro-Romanian, Vegliote, and Italian for Eastern Romance, and from Raeto-Romance, French, Franco-Provençal, Occitan, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese and some of their dialects, for the western branch, L shows that past participles in Western Romance reflect a preference toward leveling along arrhizotonic lines, contrary to the behavior of the past participles in eastern Romania.

A whole chapter presents the synopsis of the past-participial data examined throughout the book. L concludes that every verb in Romance has been endowed with a past participle, and three appendixes support his conclusion: The first lists the stems for principal parts of verbs in Classical Latin and Late Latin; the second considers Romance past participles according to the Late Latin etymon and replacement verbs in Romance standards; the third compares Latin past participles with their reflexes or reshaping forms in Romanian, Italian, French, Catalan, and Spanish. The author used a wide range of resources, some of which are, unfortunately, outdated. In the case of Romanian, for instance, the data that L analyzes reunites different standards with different spellings and some of the participles listed in the appendixes are a little bit confusing even for a Romanian native speaker.

The final chapter analyzes several theories about verb morphology from the perspective that irregularity in past participles tends to remain in the highest-frequency verbs and leveled in the verbs displaying a lower frequency.

In spite of the inadequacy mentioned above, L is to be admired for his courage to deal with such a delicate subject as past participles and especially for his temerity to treat it from a diachronic point of view in a family of languages that continues to capture the linguists’ attention.