Devría and debería: the Homonymic Clash and the Lexical Fusion in the Old Spanish

Abstract

The phenomenon of homonymic clash deals with the fate of a lexeme would have ‘disappeared’ from a language in the past, for a combination of phonetic and semantic reasons. Since its discovery early this century, this phenomenon has been used in attempts to explicate the ‘loss’ of some lexical items, a process that embraces a current polysemic word that would have taken over the semantic values of its past rival. This article studies the case of ‘deber’ from quite a wide perspective. Concluding that some of the semantic values of this verb would have resulted from a clash with another similar verb, it eventually prepares his lexical fusion in place of ‘lexical loss’ as a more appropriate term.