Traditional historical linguists have amassed a large body of facts about specific morphological changes in particular languages, yet there is very little literature on the subject that takes modern advances in theory into consideration. This chapter will briefly describe some aspects of a recent approach to morphology, Distributed Morphology (DM), in the generative tradition. In the following chapter we will use those concepts to analyze well-attested types of morphological change.

Morphological theory and morphological change

When it became clear in the 1870s that sound change is normally regular in phonological terms, historical linguists undertook to separate regular sound changes from other types of change in the forms of words. The latter were classed together as “analogy,” defined as the influence of forms on other forms. It became generally accepted that analogical change typically operates in terms of proportions between sets of forms. For instance, the replacement of English besought by beseeched (attested as an alternative at least since John Milton) can be explained by the following analogical proportion, given that the past tense of preach is preached:

1. preach : preached : : beseech : X; X = beseeched.