Abstract:

This chapter is dedicated to the description of the inflectional morphology of Judaeo-Spanish, i.e., its form-class words (lexical categories) and structure-class words (functional categories). The morphology of Judaeo-Spanish preserves, with some changes, the characteristics of Ibero-Romance languages: several grammatical functions are expressed morphologically through nominal or verbal inflectional endings, especially person, tense, and number for verbs, and gender (masculine and feminine) and number (singular and plural) for nouns. In the verbal system, tense, person, number, and mood are generally distinguished by verbal suffixes. In recent generations, the paradigms of compound verbal forms composed of the auxiliary tener and the past participle have developed secondary, mostly aspectual, meanings.