It has long been noticed that the forms produced in the natural process of acquiring inflectional morphology are strikingly similar to forms produced by morphophonemic or analogical change. A systematic comparison of the two dynamic processes reveals that essentially the same principles, of both a formal and substantive nature, are at work. Furthermore, the order of acquisition of person and tense categories in verbs, and the patterns of substitution in child language, suggest hypotheses concerning possible analogical changes, and the structuring of morphophonemic stem alternations in synchronic systems. The latter hypothesis, that stem alternations correspond to tense categories rather than person categories across tenses, is tested on a random sample of’ 44 languages. No disconfirming evidence is found. The question of the possible role of children in morphophonemic change is considered briefly. © 1979, Walter de Gruyter. All rights reserved.
