Cover not available
Part of
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
References

References

Bertinetto, Pier M., and Michele Loporcaro
1988 Certamen phonologicum. Papers from the 1987 Cortona phonology meeting. Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier.Google Scholar
Burzio, Luigi
1986 Italian Syntax. Dordrecht: Reidel. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Calabrese, Andrea
1994 “Syncretism phenomenon in the clitic systems of Italian and Sardinian dialects and the notion of morphological change.” Proceedings of NELS 25: 151–174.Google Scholar
2011 “Metaphony in Romance.” The Blackwell Companion to Phonology: 2631–2661.Google Scholar
Chierchia, Gennaro
1986 “Length, syllabification and the phonological cycle in Italian.” Journal of Italian Linguistics 8: 5–33.Google Scholar
1989 “A semantics for unaccusatives and its syntactic consequences.” Ms., Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam
1995 The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
1999/2001 “Derivation by Phase.” In Ken Hale: A Life in Language, ed. by Michael Kenstowicz, 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
2000 “Minimalist Inquiries: the Framework.” In Step by step: Essays on Minimalist Syntax in Honor of Howard Lasnik, ed. by Roger Martin, David Michaels and Juan Uriagereka, 89–156. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Cocchi, Gloria
1995 La selezione dell’ausiliare. Padova: Unipress.Google Scholar
D’Alessandro, Roberta, and Ian Roberts
2010 “Past participle agreement in Abruzzese: split auxiliary selection and the null-subject parameter.” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 28, 41–72. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Embick, David
1995 “Mobile inflections in Polish.” Proceedings of NELS 25: 127–142.Google Scholar
Fanciullo, Franco
1986 “Syntactic reduplication and the Italian dialects of the Centre-South.” Journal of Italian Linguistics 8: 67–104.Google Scholar
1997 Raddoppiamento Sintattico e la ricostruzione linguistica del Sud italiano. Pisa: ETS.Google Scholar
Forchheimer, Paul
1953 The category of person in language. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hall, Robert
1964 “Initial consonants and syntactic doubling in West Romance.” Language 40: 551–556. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Halle, Morris, and Alec Marantz
1993 “Distributed Morphology and the Pieces of Inflection.” The View from Building 20: 111–176.Google Scholar
1994 “Some key features of Distributed Morphology.” MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 21: Papers on phonology and morphology: 275–288.Google Scholar
Harley, Heidi
1994 “Hug a tree: Deriving the morphosyntactic feature hierarchy.” MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 21: Papers on phonology and morphology: 289–320.Google Scholar
Harley, Heidi, and Ritter Elizabeth
2002 “Person and number in pronouns: a feature-geometric analysis” Language 78: 482–526. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harris, James
1994 “The syntax-phonology mapping in Catalan and Spanish clitics.” MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 21: Papers on phonology and morphology: 321–353.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce
1989 “Compensatory Lenghtening in Moraic Phonology.” Linguistic Inquiry 20: 253-306.Google Scholar
Holmberg, Anders, and Ian Roberts
2010 “Introduction: parameters in minimalist theory.” In Null Subjects: the structure of parametric variation, ed. by Theresa Biberauer, Anders Holmberg, Ian Roberts, and Michelle Sheehan, 1–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hubert, Haider, and Rositta Rindler-Schjerve
1987 “The parameter of auxiliary selection. Italian-German contrasts.” Linguistics 25: 1029–1055.Google Scholar
Ledgeway, Adam
2000 A Comparative Syntax of the Dialects of Southern Italy: A Minimalist Approach. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Legendre, Gerardine
1989 “Unaccusativity in French”. Lingua 79: 95–164. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 “A formal typology of person-based auxiliary selection in Italo-Romance.” In Syntactic variation. The Dialects of Italy, ed. by Roberta D’Alessandro, Adam Ledgeway, and Ian Roberts, 186–200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Loporcaro, Michele
1988 “History and geography of raddoppiamento fonosintattico: remarks on the evolution of a phonological rule.” In Certamen phonologicum. Papers from the 1987 Cortona phonology meeting, ed. by Pier M. Bertinetto, and Michele Loporcaro, 341–387. Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier.Google Scholar
1997a “Lenghtening and raddoppiamento fono sintattico.” In The dialects of Italy, ed. by Martin Maiden, and Mair Parry, 41–51. York: Routledge. Basel-Tübingen: Francke.Google Scholar
1997b L’origine del raddoppiamento fono sintattico. Saggio di fonologia diacronica romanza.Google Scholar
1998 Sintassi comparata dell’accordo participiale romanzo. Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier.Google Scholar
2010 “The logic of Romance past participle agreement.” In Syntactic variation. The Dialects of Italy, ed. by Roberta D’Alessandro, Adam Ledgeway, and Ian Roberts, 225–243. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Manzini, Maria R., and Leonardo M. Savoia
2005 I dialetti italiani e romanci. Morfosintassi generativa. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso.Google Scholar
Nespor, Marina
1993 Fonologia. Bologna: Il Mulino.Google Scholar
Noyer, Rolf
1997 Features, Positions and Affixes in Autonomous Morphological Structure. New York: Garland Publishing.Google Scholar
Passino, Diana
2012 “The weight of empty structure: Raddoppiamento Sintattico blocking in Teraman Abruzzese”. In Studi e Saggi Linguistici, ed. by Romano Lazzeroni, and Giovanna Marotta, 105–133. Pisa: ETS.Google Scholar
Pellegrini, Giovanni B.
1977 La Carta dei dialetti d’Italia. Pisa: Pacini.Google Scholar
Perlmutter, David M.
1978 “Impersonal Passives and the Unaccusative Hypothesis.” Proceedings of the 4th Annual Meeting of the Berkley Linguistic Society: 157–189. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ritter, Elizabeth, and Martina Wiltschko
2009 “Varieties if INFL: TENSE, LOCATION and PERSON.” In Alternatives to Cartography, ed. by Jeroen van Craenenbroek, 153–201. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 “The compositon of INFL: An exploration of tense, tenseless languages and tenseless constructions.” LingBuzz/001078, July 2010.Google Scholar
Schuchardt, Hugo
1874 “De quelques modifications de la consonne initiale dans les dialectes de la Sardaigne, du Centre et du Sud de l'Italie.” Romania 3: 1–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sorace, Antonella
2000 “Gradients in auxiliary selection with intransitive verbs.” Language 76: 859–890. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Torcolacci, Giuseppe
2014 “Il Raddoppiamento Fonosintattico e la codifica di tratti morfosintattici. Il caso dei dialetti italiani meridionali.” L’Italia dialettale LXXV: 247–271.Google Scholar
2015 Marking the Default. Auxiliary selection in Southern Italian dialects. Utrecht: LOT.Google Scholar
Van Valin, Robert D.
1990 “Semantic parameters of split intransitivity.” Language 66: 221–260. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vincent, Nigel
1988 “Non-linear phonology in diachronic perspective: stress and word-structure in Latin and Italian.” In Certamen phonologicum. Papers from the 1987 Cortona phonology meeting, ed. by Pier M. Bertinetto, and Michele Loporcaro, 421–432. Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier.Google Scholar
Waltereit, Richard
2004 “Fossils of a former phonological rule: irregular raddoppiamento fonosintattico.” Philologie im Netz 29: 40–59.Google Scholar