Attraction to the Unmarked in Old Spanish Leveling

Leveling is a mechanism that restores or imposes uniformity on paradigms, thereby upholding the principle “one meaning one form” (Humboldt’s Universal). In a set of inflectionally-related forms, the shared element is the verb stem, whose meaning is constant across all forms. The principle of onemeaning-one-form is contravened whenever a stem alternation arises as the result of a phonological process that is conditioned in some of the forms but not others, and a common solution to this mismatch is paradigm leveling. For the most part, discussions on leveling deal with why a given instance of leveling operates in the direction it does. Take for example a stem with two alternants. Leveling has two choices as to which alternant may serve as the “attractor,” since either alternant is viable as an output form. What we find, however, is that leveling does not depend on the flip of a coin; rather, it is guided by several general principles that exert varying degrees of influence on the outcome. One of these appears to be phonological markedness. Figure (1) shows a classic case of leveling from Old Spanish. At this stage of the language, the verb vençer ‘to win’ (and many like it, such as mereçer, conoçer, ofreçer...) displayed a stem alternation that was the result of palatalization and affrication. This change was regularly conditioned by a front vowel. The affricate appeared in all forms of the present indicative except the 1st singular.