Morphological constraints and diachrony: the Latin -men suffix

Abstract

In this paper we discuss the long history of the Latin affix men, paying attention to its uncommon increase in productivity from the first attes- tations (a bunch of archaic words that demonstrate the Indo-European legacy of men) to its outcomes in the Romance varieties. Our claim is that in the long diachronic path from Pre-Latin to Late Latin, two rele- vant morphological processes interested men, leading to both its formal and semantic evolution: (i) the rise of the thematic pattern, that is related to the success of men in the classical stage; (ii) a reanalysis process, that isolated it from other nominalization affixes, and made it possible to apply it also to nouns and adjectives. Both changes resulted in the acquisition of more complex semantic values, still observed in dialectal data. An interesting point of our hypothesis is that the structural options we outlined were already active in the most ancient phases but developed as morphological tendencies only in later stages of Latin.

DOI: 10.4424/lam142025-2