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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 11: Selected papers from the 44th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), London, Ontario
Edited by Silvia Perpiñán, David Heap, Itziri Moreno-Villamar and Adriana Soto-Corominas
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 11] 2017
► pp. 127–145

Chapter 6
The morphological markedness of φ

Evidence from perfective auxiliaries in Southern Italian dialects

| Leiden University
This paper investigates the morphological markedness of φ features encoded on perfective auxiliaries in a subset of Upper Southern Italian dialects (USIDs).
Following a Distributed Morphology approach (cf. Halle & Marantz 1993, 1994, a.o.), we treat perfective auxiliaries in USIDs as syntactic heads composed of Tense and φ features whose phonological entries are inserted at PF by means of a process called Spell-Out.
Here, we argue that the overt marking of φ features attested on perfective auxiliaries in a group of USIDs depends on the application of a post-syntactic operation called Default Marking, according to which a dedicated set of φ features gets overtly marked only if its grade of markedness is uniform with the one expressed by Tense.
Keywords: Southern Italian dialects, auxiliary selection, Raddoppiamento Fonosintattico, metaphony, markedness, default, tense, φ-features
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The typology of morphological markedness of φ on perfective auxiliaries in CSIDs
  • 3.Auxiliaries in CSIDs
    • 3.1The syntactic nature
  • 4.The morphophonological markedness of φ on perfective auxiliaries in CSIDs: The operation of Default Marking
    • 4.1The uniformity of markedness in INFL
    • 4.2The Default Marking
  • 5.Summary and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 October 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.11.06tor
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