Diachrony and morphological equilibrium. The case of the southern New Indo-Aryan verb

Marathi-Konkani varieties exhibit a series of verbal formations that derive from the univerbation of a participle plus a form of ‘be’. In the creation of these new, resynthesised, sections of the verbal paradigm, several instances of systematic homonymies arose, which recurrently involve the cells of the first and second person plural and affect several dimensions of the paradigm (aspect syncretism, mood syncretism and gender-agreement syncretism are all observed). At the same time, in inherited synthetic verb forms, the first and second person plural cells show neutralisation of inflection-class distinctions. According to the analysis proposed here, these homonymies can be exhaustively explained neither in terms of phonological development, nor with reference to the characteristics of morphosyntactic properties, but are at least in part due to a general tendency to “morphological equilibrium” that disfavours non-syncretic cumulative exponents uniquely associated with critically rare paradigm-cells.