Morphological leveling

In linguistics, morphological leveling or paradigm leveling is the generalization of an inflection across a linguistic paradigm, a group of forms with the same stem in which each form corresponds in usage to different syntactic environments, or between words. The result of such leveling is a paradigm that is less varied, having fewer forms. When a language becomes less synthetic, it is often a matter of morphological leveling. An example is the conjugation of English verbs, which has become almost unchanging today (see also null morpheme), thus contrasting sharply, for example, with Latin, in which one verb has dozens of forms, each one expressing a different tense, aspect, mood, voice, person, and number. For instance, English sing has only two forms in the present tense (I/you/we/they sing and he/she sings), but its Latin equivalent cantāre has six: one for each combination of person and number. There are two types of paradigm leveling. In this case, the paradigm leveling occurs within the same paradigm. In this way, one form of a word takes on the characteristic(s) of another form within its own paradigm. In trans-paradigmatic leveling, the process occurs between two forms originating from two separate paradigms. This means that a form from one paradigm begins to resemble the form of another from a separate paradigm. In this application of leveling, the verb to be becomes leveled to a select few forms used in the language. To be leveling is considered the extension by analogy of the (more frequent) third-person singular form is to other persons, such as I is and they is. In English, this would be the use of I is for I am and they is for they are. This leveling extends to the past tense for was. In dialects that use this leveling, examples would be "They was late" and "We was fixing it". An ablaut is the vowel changes within a single root or its relations that is common to many Indo-European languages. Within the terms of paradigm leveling, ablaut leveling occurs when the variation in the vowels used to differentiate between forms weakens, or lessens, to mimic a similar form.