The verbs ‘rain’ and ‘snow’ in Gallo-Romance, and other morphological mismatches in diachrony

The historical morphology of the verb ‘snow’ in Francoprovençal presents a conundrum, in that it is clearly analogically influenced by the verb ‘rain’, for obvious reasons of lexical semantic similarity, but the locus of that influence is not the ‘root’ (the ostensible bearer of lexical meaning) but desinential inflexion-class members, which are in principle independent of any lexical meaning. Similar morphological changes are also identified for other Gallo-Romance verbs. It seems, in effect, that speakers can identify exponents of the lexical meaning of word-forms in linear sequences larger than the apparent ‘morphemic’ composition of those word-forms, even when such a composition may seem prima facie transparent and obvious. It is argued that these facts are inherently incompatible with ‘constructivist’, morpheme-based, models of morphology, and strongly compatible with what have been called ‘abstractivist’ (‘word-and-paradigm’) approaches, which generally take entire word-forms as the primary units of morphological analysis.