We are pleased to invite you to the lecture given by Professor Martin Maiden
on 12 December 2019, at Charles University in Prague,
Faculty of Arts, Department of Romance Studies, Room n. 116 at 14:30.

In this lecture, Professor Maiden will illustrate from various Romance languages two related types of
morphological change, namely folk etymology and contamination. These phenomena involve
associative influences between words which are not otherwise related. In the typical case, folk
etymology confers the appearance of a compound word on an otherwise opaque and completely
arbitrary sign (e.g., the English loanword bowsprit—a part of a sailing ship— is borrowed into French
as beaupré, literally ‘beautiful meadow’). Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, such changes usually
do not ‘motivate’ such words, but actually tend to make ‘nonsense’ of them. Contamination occurs
between semantically related terms (e.g., Latin CRASSUS ‘fat’ influenced by GROSSUS ‘large’ > Italian
grasso). A particular case of contamination of the verb ‘snow’ by the verb ‘rain’ in various Alpine
Romance varieties will be considered, which has the remarkable characteristic that the locus of the
contamination is not the lexical portion of these verbs, but their inflexion-class marking. The conclusion
will be that both types of phenomena tend to illustrate the autonomy of morphological structure from
the lexical or grammatical meanings apparently associated with them. Such data are complementary
to other claims Maiden has made about the role of autonomous or ‘morphomic’ paradigmatic
structures in diachrony.

Martin Maiden is Professor of the Romance Languages at the University of Oxford and Director of the Oxford
Research Centre for Romance Linguistics. His main interests are in Italian and Romanian linguistics and
dialectology. He has worked intensively on the evolution of morphological systems, in particular on the history
of the Romance verb. This outstanding research is now presented in his recent book The Romance Verb.
Morphomic Structure and Diachrony (OUP 2018). He is also co-editor of important collective works on the history
and structure of the Romance languages, in particular The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages (OUP 2016,
co-edited with Adam Ledgeway) and he is a co-author of The Oxford History of Romanian Morphology (OUP
2020). Professor Maiden has also been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2003.

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