Internal structure of verbal stems in the Germanic languages

The authors summarize the first significant results in order to verify to what extent the European languages of the Indo-European family are concerned by a typological change in verb morphology: a shift from a more conservative stage, where morphemes are either strongly integrated within the root or “root expansions”, towards a stage where functionality shifts to suffixal morphemes. By means of recapitulatory tables, the paper sets out the method of analysis and the results achieved in the Germanic area, beginning with Gothic and Anglo-Saxon. In spite of common opinion, the evidence that both languages are quite innovative in their trend to exomorphism emerges from the ratio between endomorphic/mixed stems and exomorphic stems: the Gothic index is 0,430 (0,445), the Anglo-Saxon one is 0,531, which means a stage by far less archaic than the Indo-Aryan (1,777 to 0,965) and the Avestan one (0,665).