Rhizotonic Past Participles In Romance Languages: A Contrastive Study Of Italian, Spanish And Portuguese

This study aims to analyze rhizotonic past participles in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, with the purpose of identifying the differences between them. It draws upon the concept of analogy introduced by Bynon (1993), and the methodology includes an analysis of a corpus comprised of 247 items obtained through the comparison of the aforementioned Romance languages. Two hypotheses were tested: first, that the rhizotonic past participles in Italian would be found predominantly in the second conjugation, diverging from Spanish and Portuguese, what was confirmed by the collected data; and second, that the rhizotonic past participles in Romance languages in the first conjugation would be predominantly innovations, what was also confirmed by the data. It was found that the main sources of the rhizotonic past participles in the Romance languages considered in this study are: the heritage from the Latin rhizotonic past participles; the incorporation of Latin adjectives; analogical change and analogical creations.