Remotivating inflectional classes
Livio Gaeta · Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. Series 4, Current issues in linguistic theory · 2020
Abstract In Titsch, a Walser German dialect spoken in the Aosta Valley, a remodeling of the old strong/weak verb classes found in the rest of the Germanic languages has taken place, whereby verbs belonging to the strong class turn out to display both strong and weak past participles. This outcome results from the reuse or exaptation of the original morphological differentiation based on a purely lexically-governed distribution which has been remotivated by associating the morphological features with specific constructional schemas resulting from several processes of grammaticalization.