Modeling Diatopic Variation of Lenition of Latin -T- in Aragonese Past Participles: Coincidences With Castilian and Catalan?

1. Introduction: Evolution of the Iberian Romance Past Participles from Latin

The Romance past participles, as is the case with nearly all verbal reflexes, trace their development to the accusative form of the Latin passive perfect participle. Through systematic sound changes – and in many cases, analogy – the forms used in Latin became the verbal participles in use today.

Alongside the verbal past participles are the participial adjectives, frequently used in passive constructions but also as noun modifiers. In most cases the adjectives follow the pattern of using the inflectional morphology present in the language, without many other morphophonological changes.

This is not the case in every Romance language, however. Nor is it completely true that participial morphology is uniform within each language, as evidenced by the French, Italian, and Catalan participial endings containing /u/.^[1] The purposes of this paper are twofold: to discuss and model the divergent participial morphology of Aragonese, and to place the language’s development appropriately with regard to Castilian and Catalan, the two Iberian languages in contact with Aragonese within its isogloss.

2. Aragonese Past Participles

A particularly salient indicator of the pluricentricity of modern Aragonese is the distribution of regular past participle morphophonology. Though the forms in use today generally follow isoglossic boundaries, there is still overlap in certain areas. The area considered to be the Central Aragonese zone retains the most conservative participle forms, whereas all surrounding areas of Aragonese have evolved the forms via lenition.

2.1. Modern Central Aragonese, Old Eastern and Southern Aragonese

Modern scholars such as Bercero Otal (2014, p. 90) regard Central Aragonese as “the purest form of Aragonese […] free from Spanish and Catalan influences.” The participial forms characteristic of this region play a considerable role in this perception. Regular past participles in Central Aragonese demonstrate a high degree of phonological conservatism, rivaling that of Latin from a pan-Romance perspective. Disregarding the elision of Latin -M – common to all of Romance – and the lowering of final -U- to /o/ in verbal and masculine adjectival forms, it is noted that Central Aragonese participles and participial adjectives retain the -T- from Latin with no apparent lenition whatsoever (Laurent, 1995).

These endings -ato/-ata/-ito/-ita, with their distinctive characteristics, have traditionally been regarded as highly indicative of an Aragonese heritage, in literature as well as in grammatical prescription. According to Nagore Laín (2011), the greatest Aragonese authors have shown a preference for these endings over any others found within the linguistic area. Indeed, the official position of the Consello asesor de l’aragonés is that the non-lenited participles found in Central Aragonese are the “genuine, proper forms of Aragonese.”

The conservative participle, though currently restricted to the central zone in areas such as Ribagorza and parts of Sobrarbe (García de Diego, 1990), was more widespread in past varieties of the language. These forms were historically salient in the southern (López Susín, 2013, p. 18) and eastern (Terrado Pablo, 2002) areas of the Aragonese linguistic zone as well as in the popular literature of Aragón, but over time these forms were made archaic, replaced by the endings to be discussed in the following subsection.

2.2. Western Aragonese, Modern Eastern and Southern Aragonese

Whereas the medial consonant in participial endings is faithfully preserved in Central Aragonese, a distinct evolution was observed in the rest of the linguistic zone. The Latin /-t-/ in participial endings is lenited uniquely, as shown in Table 3 below.

Probably the most notable characteristic of participle paradigms in these subdialects of Aragonese is the lack of uniformity across grammatical genders. The feminine adjectival reflexes historically lenited Latin /-t-/ simply by voicing to /-d-/. However, the masculine reflexes progress even further by eliding Latin /-t-/ completely, leaving a final diphthong /-au -iu/ behind.

2.3. Discussion of surrounding influences on Aragonese participial morphophonology

Having discussed the geographic distribution of the Aragonese past participles, the question arises: how, within the same language, did the morphology diverge in such a fashion? Let us consider the potential contact issues of Catalan and Castilian coinciding with Aragonese in different areas.

2.3.1. Preservation of /-t-/ and potential coincidences with Catalan

If the conservative participial forms are given a cursory examination, one might conclude that the preservation of /-t-/ in certain areas might be due to contact with a nearby language. Indeed, we find that the masculine participial forms in Catalan also end in /-t/: amat(s), perdit(s), and partit(s). Given that Aragonese is, as a linguistic zone, bordered to the east by Catalan and also by Occitan to the north across the border with France, could the preservation of /-t-/ be owed to contact between the languages, particularly modern Central Aragonese and Old Eastern Aragonese? Such a conclusion would be problematic for a few reasons.

First, it is important to remember that, in the phonological history of Catalan, almost all final unstressed vowels, specifically /e i o u/, were apocopated. Without the vocalic segment to the right, newly final /-t/ had lost the context in which it would otherwise have lenited via voicing to /-⁠d-⁠/. This would be applicable only to the masculine forms, but note that the modern feminine forms all do show voicing: amada(s), perdida(s), partida(s). The voicing occurs within these reflexes because /-a/ never suffered apocope, thereby preserving the phonological context in which lenition could take place. Throughout the history of Central and Old Eastern Aragonese, we do not find evidence of any of the Catalan developments; /-t-/ in participial endings remains unvoiced despite always being found in an intervocalic context. Of particular interest is the later development in Eastern Aragonese in which the participles more closely resemble what is found in the southern and western areas.

2.3.2. Lenition of /-t-/ > /-d-/ and potential coincidences with Castilian

What, then, of the areas in which Latin /-t-/ is completely elided at the phonemic level? Is there a sufficient argument for this development as an effect of contact with Castilian, in which the original Latin phoneme evolved to /-d-/ in all participles? We know that, in various subdialects of the language, especially in Andalucia and some regions of Latin America, there is a strong tendency toward leniting phonemic /-d-/ to zero in participial endings; outcomes such as hablado [a.β̞la.o ~ a.β̞lau̯] are common in these areas (Moreno Fernández, 2020). It may be the case that the Aragonese past participles followed a sociophonetic path similar to what is observed in the aforementioned Spanish-speaking regions.

We find a few structural differences between the modern languages, though. In Castilian participles in which /-d-/ allophonically lenites to zero, the phoneme is still underlyingly present across all gender-marked reflexes of participials. Alba (2023) in his discussion of Dominican Spanish notes the sociolinguistic division of realization versus reduction of /-d-/: the prescribed norm is to pronounce [ð̞], whereas full lenition is a stigmatized variant. This differs from non-Central Aragonese in which (1) masculine participials have no underlying /-d-/ and (2) feminine participials retain the segment for phonotactic purposes (e.g., hiatus-breaking and illicit diphthong avoidance).

Terrado Pablo (2002) remarks on the development of participial morphophonology in Ribagorza, a region of southeastern Aragon bordered by Catalonia to the east. He concludes that the development of these endings was not borrowed from Spanish but rather influenced by it, for a few reasons. First, the diglossic reality of the region gives rise to various perceptions of Castilian versus Aragonese forms. Nagore Laín (2020) also cites several instances of /-ado -ido/ in non-literary Aragonese writing: sembrado for sembrau, pagados for pagaus, recibido for recibiu, and so on. Second, Terrado Pablo (2002) reports that Ribagorzan speakers consider the /-au -iu/ markers to be representatives of “true” Aragonese speech, whereas /-ado -ido/ endings feel “Castilianized” yet more prestigious due to the position of Castilian in the community. Terrado Pablo (2002) mentions also that there is some historical support for vocalization of Latin /-t-/ after apocope, followed by voicing the now-final /-t/ to /-d/, a development countering what is observed in Catalan. Despite the evidence and arguments for the development Ribagorzan participles, Terrado Pablo’s (2002) arguments cannot account for similar outcomes in zones not near Ribagorza, especially in the west and south of Aragon.

3. An OT Approach to the Evolution of Aragonese Participles: Faithfulness and Markedness vs. Harmony

The principal idea behind Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky, 2004) is the application of a hierarchy of relevant constraints to an input and set of output candidates, with the goal of filtering out undesirable or unobserved outcomes in order to settle on the optimal output. As originally conceived, OT analyses involved two opposing perspectives: one of faithfulness, or one of markedness.

The notion of faithfulness refers to the tendency or desire to have the optimal candidate remain as similar to the input as possible. In any analysis prioritizing faithfulness, outcomes that closely resemble the input are considered to be more faithful and are minimally penalized. By contrast, outputs that show a high degree of divergence from the input are considered to be less faithful and incur multiple penalties. Constraints devised to preserve faithfulness are many in number and are well established in the field. Such constraints are defined to resist segment deletion (Max[imality]), insertion (Dep[endence]), featural modifications (Ident[itcality]), segment position changes such as metathesis (Linearity), and many other commonly observed phenomena.

On the other end of the spectrum is the notion of markedness which refers to the necessity of the optimal candidate to differentiate itself from the input. When analyzing accommodations of words borrowed from other languages, a markedness approach is advantageous when the input from the source language contains some structure that, in the target language, is highly uncommon or not permissible at all. Faithfully preserving said structure incurs violations, as would modifying the structure in some manner that violates the phonotactic or prosodic rules of the language. Marked features include voiced stops, trills, non-high glides, and the like. Regarding phonotactic arrangements, there exist markedness constraints to filter out onset-less syllables, closed syllables, hiatuses or diphthongs, consonant clusters in either onset or coda position, and countless other outcomes. Markedness analyses of diachronically inherited words and structures are often devised to showcase relative ease of articulation, especially in many of the pathways from Latin to Romance. These phenomena include cluster reduction, elimination of certain final consonants, and other cases of elision, as well as degemination, intervocalic voicing, fricativization, and other instances of lenition.

There are instances in which constraints cannot be defined as binary but rather scalar. In these harmonic analyses, pioneered by McCarthy (2008), output candidates are not assigned violations based on simply straying from faithfulness or increasing in markedness. Rather, violations are assigned on a gradient basis: the more “levels” by which a candidate separates itself from the input, the same number of violations is assigned to said candidate.

The analysis of the evolution of Aragonese past participles will involve all three principles: faithfulness, markedness, and harmony. In doing so, we hope to model the patterns by which these forms evolved from antiquity to the present, showing contrasts and similarities between each other as well as with the more widely spoken languages bordering Aragon.

3.1. Modeling the Current Data: Defining the Relevant Constraints

The appropriate model for either outcome, whether the conservative preservation in Central Aragonese or the innovative lenition in other varieties, must involve a variety of constraints involving faithfulness and markedness. We define one faithfulness candidate below:

1. Ident-IO([cont])

   “Maintain continuance feature value from input to output”

This constraint is violated if a segment in the output becomes any phoneme, such as a fricative or glide, that is specified as [+cont], given that /t/ from the input is [-cont]. Note that elision of said segment is not considered to be a violating situation.

Our analysis will employ three universal markedness constraints in order to filter out undesirable or unobserved outcomes. These constraints are defined as follows:

2. *Diphthong

   “Adjacent vowels remain heterosyllabic”

This constraint, in effect, filters out any candidate in which a vowel is reduced to a semivowel or glide and subsequently resyllabified to become a complex nucleus with an adjacent vowel.

3. *Hiatus

   “Adjacent vowels cannot remain heterosyllabic”

This constraint functions as the opposite of (2) in that it militates against the syllabicity of two adjacent vowels.

4. HighGlides

   “Semivowels must be specified as [+high]”

This constraint reflects the reality of the majority of Romance languages by universally requiring that, if there is a glide or semivowel in the output, it must have the feature [+high].

Finally, due to one variety of Aragonese preserving intervocalic stops with no sign of lenition, the harmonic approach discussed in the introduction to the current section will be employed here. Before mentioning the constraints, it is necessary to establish the gradient consonant strength scale against which we will evaluate the constraints. Here is said scale:

5. Consonant strength scale for harmonic analysis

   [t] > [d] > [ð̞] > Ø

We thereby define two diametrically opposed general constraints, based on this scale.

6. StrongOnset

   “Onsets must be maximally consonantal”

7. Lazy(Obs)

   “Minimize articulatory effort (of obstruents)”

   (based on Kirchner, 1996, 1998)

For this analysis, StrongOnset is violated one time for each instance of lenition from input to output, meaning that voicing incurs one violation, fricativization incurs a second, and lenition incurs a third. Lazy(Obs) functions in the opposite direction: no articulated consonant is the optimal outcome, while a fricative incurs one violation, a voiced stop incurs a second, and a voiceless stop incurs a third. It is understood that, in Romance, the phenomenon of lenition occurs in stages of gradual weakening, hence the sonority scale defined in (5). The harmonic constraints StrongOnset and Lazy(Obs) treat the elimination of an underlying segment in opposite ways. For the faithfulness constraint StrongOnset, segment deletion is considered its strongest violation, whereas for the markedness constraint Lazy(Obs), segment deletion is the most ideal outcome. The harmonic constraints serve to condense various faithfulness constraints, such as those that preserve voicing and manner features, into a more economical presentation. Both harmonic constraints also obviate the very common constraint Max(imality), which has the sole purpose of penalizing segment deletion but does not account for gradual weakening in the same fashion.^[2]

These six constraints should hereafter model every extant outcome of participle development from Latin to Aragonese. We begin with the most faithful outcome in the next subsection.

3.2. Modeling Central Aragonese

The proper constraint ranking should reflect the evolutionary direction of preservation of Latin -T- > Central Aragonese /-t-/ as preferred over any lenited outcomes. Since lenition reflects a change away from faithfulness, it is important that this analysis prioritize consonantal strength from input to output. To show this appropriately, we choose to place the greatest importance on onset strength, relegating the outcome of lenition to the lowest importance. For the sake of synthesizing this analysis with the outcomes from other areas under consideration, we include the other constraints (except HighGlides). Thus, the proposed hierarchy is as follows:

8. StrongOnset >> *Hiatus, Ident-IO([cont]), *Diphthong >> Lazy(Obs)

The scale in (8) reflects our preference for maintaining maximally consonantal onsets from input to output, which is the purpose of the constraint StrongOnset. On the other end, since the desired outcome does not feature reduced articulatory effort, Lazy(Obs) is placed at the bottom of the constraint ranking. This hierarchy, as shown in Table 4, appears to appropriately predict the outcomes of Central Aragonese.

Obviously, the preservation of /-t-/ represents the most harmonic onset, and so candidates (b-e), being more sonorous but less consonantally strong based on our defined sonority scale in (5), incur one violation for each level of sonority represented. The first of each of these violations is sufficient to clearly eliminate candidates (b-d). The candidate with some controversy is candidate (e), which completely elided the Latin onset but diphthongized in its place. If one wishes to consider this a violation of StrongOnset since the candidate has lost a consonantal segment from the input, the constraint conditions that outcome. However, the controversy arises if one claims (with merit) that diphthongs, by definition, cannot be interrupted by consonants. An alternative analysis involves the outlawing of diphthongs as shown, leaving (a) in either event to prevail as the most faithful candidate. In either case, the presence of the harmonic constraint StrongOnset conditions the gradual weakening and eventual elimination of the intervocalic stop, in conjunction with the markedness constraint *Hiatus.^[3]

As a result of the harmonic constraints appropriately filtering every unfaithful candidate, it appears the non-harmonic constraints – *Hiatus, Ident-IO([cont]), and *Diphthong – can be freely reordered without impacting the final outcome. Though hiatuses and diphthongs are possible outcomes – and diphthongs are our desired outcome in other variations of Aragonese – both are undesirable in this analysis and thus are equally conditioned by the constraints. This is reflected in the Table with the broken lines between those three constraints. All regular participial morphemes in Central Aragonese, therefore, share the same underlying evolutionary grammar.

3.3. Modeling Southern, Eastern, and Western Aragonese

Reordering the constraints should yield the expected results for the other dialect regions. The extra challenge for these varieties is the lack of uniformity compared to Central Aragonese: whereas all the outcomes in that area preserve /-t-/, the other areas vary between eliding the segment completely in masculine forms while at least preserving a (weaker) onset in the feminine reflexes. Can we use one constraint ranking to model both outcomes?

First, let us define a hierarchy for the masculine reflexes. We know that the final falling diphthong must surface in an appropriate model, indicating that neither intervocalic consonants nor hiatuses are desirable in outputs. We also recognize that, in Aragonese, the only options for Latin /-t-/ are either to be preserved or to be elided completely, meaning that there is no space for either voicing or fricativization. Noting all of the above, this is the established hierarchy for the participial endings in this area:

9. *Hiatus, Ident-IO([cont]), Lazy(Obs) >> *Diphthong >> StrongOnset

Ordering the constraints in this manner, as shown in the following Table 5, allows us to correctly predict the observed lenited and diphthongized result.

Candidates (a-b), containing stops, are eliminated, as well as candidate (c) containing a fricative. Since it is evident that the ending of an Aragonese past participle is a falling diphthong, candidate (d) is eliminated by the undesirability of a hiatus, leaving (e) as our winner.

The question, then, is whether this same hierarchy can model the feminine reflexes properly. We already know that the intervocalic stop should not lenite completely as it does in the masculine reflexes. At this point it is appropriate to include the HighGlides^[4] constraint and rank it highly:

10. HighGlides > *Hiatus, Ident-IO([cont]), Lazy(Obs) >> *Diphthong >> StrongOnset

The new constraint filters out our previously highly-ranked candidate (e). Candidates (c-d) are eliminated as before, and the anti-harmonic constraint Lazy(Obs) decides in favor of (b) over (a), which is what was desired.

3.4. A Brief Contrastive Analysis of Castilian and Catalan

It is clear, then, that each of the varieties of Aragonese evolved following a different grammar, with the Central variety favoring faithfulness to the original Latin and the surrounding subdialects penalizing certain Latin structures. In the interest of placing Aragonese participle development properly within the context of the Romance languages of Iberia, it is prudent to discuss the evolutionary grammars of Castilian and Catalan to contrast them with the Aragonese tendencies. Let us review the participial morphophonology of these languages:

• Castilian has uniform morphemes throughout the paradigms, with Latin /-t-/ evolving to a lenited /-d-/.

• Catalan shows various discrepancies between masculine and feminine morphemes, with /-t/ in masculine adjectives and /-d-/ in feminine adjectives.

Beginning with the Castilian development, we know that the intervocalic lenition of /-t-/ > /-d-/ was common in the language. The uniformity across genders is evidence of a parallel with the Central Aragonese subdialect, but the lenition suggests a restructured grammar.

It is evident that the Castilian development, while obviously showing lenition from Latin, is detained at an early point. The non-harmonic constraints Ident, *Hiatus, and *Diphthong take precedence over the harmonic constraints in order to limit the lenition to one step, in contrast to non-Central Aragonese varieties. Finally, Lazy(Obs) over StrongOnset ensures that lenition is prioritized over stop preservation. Note that these outputs are all phonemic, not allophonic or phonetic. Standard Castilian phonology dictates that /d/ in intervocalic position (along with other contexts) is produced as [ð̞], but again the spirantization does not represent a phonemic contrast. The phoneme /d/ still underlies variations in which there is no production of any consonant between the thematic vowel and /-o -a/.

Recalling from Section 3.3.1 the evolutionary path of Catalan participial forms, we find that they resemble a midpoint between the masculine Central Aragonese forms and the feminine forms from the surrounding areas. Does this indicate that the Catalan developments also suggested discrepant evolutionary grammars? Evidence suggests the opposite: had it not been for another uniqueness in Catalan morphology, the participial forms would parallel those of Castilian. As Terrado Pablo (2002) notes, Catalan phonological development stands apart largely due to the evolutionary tendency to apocopate every final unstressed vowel apart from /-a/, which was followed by (or likely concomitant with) devoicing of any final obstruents. The resulting development then patterned after what we see in non-Central Aragonese in that the masculine and feminine forms are morphophonologically divergent, necessitating a split analysis. For feminine participial adjectives which retain the same morphophonemic structure as Eastern Aragonese, we can replicate that analysis for Catalan and observe the same result:

The proper analysis of Catalan masculine participle evolution requires a separate analysis, given the uniform apocope of /-o/. To properly condition this, we add a new constraint to our hierarchy:

11. *V[-low] |_W

    ‘No word-final high or mid vowels’

12. *Constraint hierarchy for Catalan masculine participles

    **V[-low] |_W >> *Hiatus, Ident-IO([cont]), *Diphthong >> StrongOnset, Lazy(Obs)

Because of the universal nature of this development, this new constraint is highly ranked in the grammar. The above hierarchy does indeed give the expected result:

It is notable that the constraint in favor of apocopating non-low final vowels completely nullifies any effect of the harmonic analysis applied to Aragonese masculine participles. The constraints StrongOnset and Lazy(Obs) still must be dominated by the markedness and faithfulness constraints in order to yield the correct result, as Table 9 shows. Had /-o/ not suffered apocope at any point in Catalan, the verb cantar likely would have mirrored Castilian in participles and participial adjectives: *cantado/cantada/*cantados/cantadas.

4. Aragonese and its place in Spain and Romance: Status as an Official Language

Aragonese is one of the regional languages within the borders of Spain, regarded as the last surviving member of the Navarro-Aragonese language subfamily. Because of its positioning, it shares several characteristics with Catalan and Occitan, which border it to the east and north, respectively. Two major historical events have led to the predominance of Castilian within Aragonese borders: the Reconquest, after which the Kingdom of Aragon merged with the Kingdom of Castile; and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco in the mid-to-late 1900s. The Reconquest led to Castilian becoming the language of prestige and power throughout Spain, though without displacing the regional languages. It was during the Francoist regime that the use of any other language besides Castilian became illegal (or, at best, strongly discouraged). Some of the languages within Spain resisted the Francoist policies and continued to flourish, while others – Aragonese among them – became highly stigmatized and as a result less widely used, a situation which still has ramifications today.

4.1. Status of Aragonese as an Official Language in Spain

Regarding the language policies in Spain during and after the Francoist regime, three notable laws took effect a result of the ratification of the new constitution (Congreso de los Diputados, 1978). These provisions comprise Article 3 of the Preliminary Title of the Constitution:

1. Castilian became the official national language of Spain, and it became the right and responsibility of every Spanish citizen to learn it for their daily affairs.

2. The autonomous communities (re)gained the legal right to declare their respective languages official within their borders.

3. All culturally significant languages with origins within the borders of Spain were to be respected and protected.

The consequence of this has been the establishment of two separate levels, in effect, of languages alongside Castilian: co-official languages and protected languages. Languages such as Catalan, Aranese, Galician, and Basque are by statute co-official in their respective communities (Catalonia/Valencia/Balearic Islands, Galicia, the Basque Country/Navarre). However, languages such as Extremaduran, Cantabrian, Asturian, and of course Aragonese, never achieved official status in the zones where they are found, and only Asturian and Aragonese have protected status. From a usage standpoint, the co-official languages are taught in schools (as required by the curricula) and widely used in media and literature. Protected languages are also taught in schools, but their inclusion in the curriculum is frequently as an elective class instead of a compulsory subject, and Aragonese is no exception to this practice (Metzeltín, 2007). Despite the absence of compulsory education in – and of – Aragonese, which appears to bode poorly for the future survival of the language, there is a considerable percentage of the population that would like to learn to use it in their daily affairs (López Susín, 2013).

4.2. Governing Bodies and Standardization of Aragonese

One of the consequences of the Aragonese language not having co-official status, but instead protected status, is that there has not been a unified campaign to codify and standardize the language. This does not mean that there has been no attempt to establish a normative Aragonese register, however. Since the 1970s, there have been many attempts at standardizing the language, to varying degrees of success.

Several organizations claimed or attempted to position themselves as the standard-bearers of the Aragonese language. The Consello d’a Fabla Aragonesa was founded in 1976 and has as its mission the “defense, promotion, study, and spread of Aragonese” as regards history, literature, law, pedagogy, and other fields of importance. The branch of the Consello dedicated to the administration of the language itself is the Consello asesor de l’aragonés. This body was founded in 2000 to codify, normalize, and normativize the written language. As pertains to the variation in participles, the Consello asesor passed a resolution advocating for the /-ato -ito/ forms as the prescribed standard, claiming that the reduced forms /-au -iu/ from outside the central zone were a more recent development arising from contact with Castilian. Another organization, the Academia de l’Aragonés, was founded in 2006 under the auspices of the association Estudio de Filolochía Aragonesa. This group has published and updated the Gramática básica de l’aragonés since its inception, detailing the various linguistic modalities of the language. This grammar, unlike the resolutions passed by the Consello asesor, is intended to be descriptive instead of prescriptive, not giving preference to any one subdialect of Aragonese but rather mentioning the various modalities of the language as they exist.

It should be noted that the government of Aragon had not sponsored any sanctioning language academy until very recently; almost all efforts had been from private interests. In 2013, as one of the effects of the ratification of the Ley de Lenguas, the Aragonese government established the Academia Aragonesa de la Lengua (AAL) as the sole governing body of the language. According to the AAL itself, the function of the body is not to simply standardize and govern Aragonese, but rather to protect and prescribe both of the non-Castilian languages spoken within the autonomous community (the other being Catalan). The AAL positions itself alongside the other regional language academies within Spain, naming the Real Academia Galega, the Institut d’Estudis Catalans, the Academia de la Llingua Asturiana, the Academia Valènciana de la Llengua, and the Institut d’Estudi Aranesi (Acadèmia aranesa dera lengua occitana) as its peers. The AAL recognizes that its greatest challenge is to share its standardization work with all speakers within Aragon.

The later efforts to establish a standard for a pluricentric language such as Aragonese, in contrast to the earlier efforts of other languages, likely perpetuate the pluricentricity of the language. As such, each area within the Aragonese dialect zone has its varieties entrenched. Indeed, Mott (2010) notes that the inability or unwillingness of linguists and grammarians to reach a consensus regarding various aspects of the language, such as orthographic and morphosyntactic conventions, has been the greatest obstacle to reaching a unified Aragonese grammar. He also remarks, on a somewhat pessimistic note, that at the societal level there may be little benefit in learning a standardized variant to speakers from the various regions who could just as easily use Castilian to communicate with speakers from other regions.

5. Conclusions and Directions for Future Research

We have shown, via a constraint-based analysis, how the underlying evolutionary grammars of regional subdialects of Aragonese regular past participles diverged significantly from the surrounding languages of Castilian and Catalan, as well as each other. Through our analysis, we find that Central Aragonese shows the most conservative development from Latin, while the surrounding regions show a more “innovative” or “radical” evolution from antiquity.

However, the diachronic case of evolutionary Aragonese is not closed. Sánchez (2011) notes that the traditionally defined isoglossic zones of Aragonese are not as distinctly divided as the current scholarship assumes, and that features generally ascribed to one zone can often be found by speakers in another. This pluricentric language is so fractured that, in order to capture all of its evolutionary trends, several simultaneous analyses of its (morpho)phonological developments would be necessary. Future directions of research along these same lines may involve other divergences such as diphthongization and vowel raising patterns not observed in Castilian, as a point of reference. These developments may be compared with similar situations in other pluricentric minority languages in Spain such as Asturian, itself bordering the standardized regional language of Galician.