Palatalization in Romance

Sun, 25 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Palatalization represents one of the phonological processes that restructured the Romance consonantal inventory the most. In this chapter, we examine the phonological and articulatory complexities underlying this process. We mainly deal with palatalization within Calabrese’s (2005) feature-based phonological model. We compare this analysis with a number of competing models: those based on articulatory phonetics, perception, phonological grounding, and Optimality Theory. Our take is that Calabrese’s constraint-and-repair model is the only framework able to account for the wide spectrum of variation across Romance varieties with a minimal number of theoretical, though phonologically motivated, stipulations.

Allomorphy at Italian determiners at the morphology-phonology interface

Sun, 09 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Allomorphic alternations are often accounted for by assuming them to be listed as idiosyncratic lexical entries. This paper analyzes the forms of the determiners (definite, indefinite, and demostratives) and definite prepositions across all Italo-Romance varieties, to show that such a view (for a review on accounts for the definite determiner, see Garrapa 2011) may lead to lose crucial generalizations at the morpho-phonological interface. Here, I propose a novel alternative account couched in the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz1993), which makes use of morpho–phonological operations, such as positive instructions (rules), or repairs triggered in response to violations of active filters (Calabrese, 2009). I show that such an account is able to catch the underlying morpho–phonological generalizations and therefore more coherently explain allomorphic phenomena occurring in the D–domain.

6 | Roberto Petrosino

Palatalization in Romance

Allomorphy at Italian determiners at the morphology-phonology interface