Can We Speak of Cyclicity in the Evolution of Languages ? The Concept of “Deflexivity” in the Typological Evolution of the Romance Languages, the Examples of French, Italian and Romanian

Abstract

This article proposes a reflection on the use of the concept of "deflexivity" as part of the typological evolution of Romance languages in order to identify more general assumptions in the field of diachrony. It is not a universalist point of view insofar as Gustave William himself, the inventor of this concept, also created the concept of symmetrical “inflexity” representing all inverse operations. In our study, we limited ourselves to the analysis of deflexivity in Romance languages, particularly French, Italian and Romanian, our ultimate goal is to raise the general issues relating to the development of typological languages. For this, we compared the diachronic evolution of French and Italian by some references to Romanian to highlight points of convergence and the largest differences in particular characteristics of a typological perspective.

Keywords

• general linguistics
• typological linguistics
• linguistics of Romance languages
• historic linguistics
• comparative linguistics
• psychomecanics of language.