Non‐Morphological Sources and Triggers of Morphological Change

The interaction of morphology with the other components of grammar – phonology, syntax, and semantics – through history often gives rise to morphological changes. At the phonology–morphology interface we discuss consonant alternations and vowel deletion in Russian (Slavic) that led to lexically conditioned allomorphy and/or emergence of patterns of non‐concatenative morphology, similarly to the history of German umlaut. At the syntax–morphology interface we present a detailed study of the changes affecting spatial case suffixes and postpositions in Hungarian (Uralic); we also mention diachronic morphosyntactic changes from Romance and Mayan languages that yielded new TAM markers. These changes all involved a reanalysis of a syntactic structure into a morphological one. At the semantics–morphology interface, we discuss various changes in English that were semantically motivated. These include back‐formation patterns that were originally motivated by folk etymology and new patterns of derivational morphology that arose with the help of a metonymical shift.