Stress-Conditioned Allomorphy in Surmiran (Rumantsch)

I approach my topic here from a somewhat different perspective than that of several other contributors to the present volume. To be clear, my knowledge of the Romance languages and their comparative grammar is quite limited, and my knowledge of their histories even more so. e discussion below, with some limited exceptions, is thus not based on detailed historical and comparative analyses, but rather represents a somewhat self-contained account of a single synchronic system. As Romance Philology, therefore, it may be judged to be weak; but I submit that its weaknesses are similar to those of a child encountering the primary linguistic data provided by those around her, and forced to acquire the underlying linguistic system on that basis. If the analysis I offer differs in some ways from what one might be inclined to on the basis of the precedents set by other languages, I suggest that that is entirely appropriate. After all, linguistic systems do change, sometimes quite radically in their nature but with very little alteration in the surface forms they support, as a result of new generations of learners making different abductive inferences from the data at hand (Andersen ).