Synchronic vs diachronic morphologyconvergences and divergences

Resumen

Synchronic morphology deals with word structures and their presence in the linguistic consciousness of speakers, whereas diachronic morphology analyzes the historical changes undergone by inflectional and derivational affixes, as well as their respective paradigms. Diachronic morphology relates each word to its etymon. Synchronic morphology, in turn, deals with morphological structures, not historical processes. It therefore relates inflected, derived, or composite words to the more elementary lexical items that speakers are supposed to connect them with, according to the systematic patterns provided by their linguistic competence. Synchronic morphology may certainly avoid the tortuous and convoluted changes required by non-generalizable anomalous morphophonological processes. There are, at least, two ways to do this. A “Word and Paradigm” solution is to argue that the regular expected form is preempted by a learned word, which displays an opaque morphological structure. The other option is to postulate a suppletive root and ignore its internal structure.