Montserrat Adam-Aulinas
This paper presents the dialectal characteristics of verbal and nominal inflectional morphology in quantified morphematic maps. We call these maps "morphematic" because the information provided concerning the various sites investigated corresponds not to words, but to morphs. The adjective "quantified" reflects the fact that the maps are not limited to indicating whether or not the feature analysed is found in a particular locality, but calculate the extent of its use via the examination of different lexemes in which it may be appear.
This study applies morphematic maps to the Catalan language area. The verbal characteristics analyzed were selected from data included in the corpus compiled by Alcover (1906-1928), which is practically exhaustive regarding the verbal paradigm. The noun characteristics were selected from the bibliography. The features chosen are the ones that appear in the northern area of central Catalan but not in the rest of the area in which this dialect is spoken.
The data corresponding to the current use of the features selected were compiled in fieldwork carried out between 1999 and 2003. The analysis of these data and the Alcover corpus indicates the distribution of each characteristic within the area examined. The study of this distribution and the presence or absence of a characteristic in the neighboring dialects (and, if present, in which ones) allows a dynamic, non-static view of the area: each location in the study area is a point on the journey - or the walk, to apply the term used in graph theory - made by the features studied.
The diachronic comparison between the data compiled by Alcover (1906-1928) and the current data also provides an accurate idea of language change over a century, and of its current trends.