Stem Regularisation, Stem Synthesis and Stem Production in Tat
Résumé
Tat tense-aspect-mood (TAM) categories, like in many Iranian languages, feature a binary stem distinction, whereby either stem represents the morphological nucleus of a given TAM category. The morphological distribution of the two stems in Tat resembles that in Persian. The Iranian linguistic tradition refers to them as “present stem” and “past stem”. Owing to the semantic distribution of the Tat TAM categories, different from that of Persian, I have opted for the terms “Stem 1” (for “present stem”) and “Stem 2” (for “past stem”).
Tat dialects are affected by a stem reanalysis process, which, on the one hand, reduces or eliminates the difference between historical stems and, on the other hand, creates a new stem distinction. In this talk, I use diachronic information and dialectal comparison to illustrate the development of this change, which seems to have been in progress since at least the mid-nineteenth century.