Nounness, gender, class and syntactic structures in Italian nouns

Nicola Lampitelli | University Paris 7

This work proposes an analysis of Italian nouns. It explores the concept of the “final vowel” and claims that it is an analyzable object which is active in the formation of nouns in the language. The paper suggests that each “final vowel” is a complex morphophonological object (in the spirit of Kaye, Lowenstamm & Vergnaud 1985, 1990) and that only a syntactic approach to noun formation (Halle & Marantz 1993) can fully account for the distribution of such morphophonological complexes. On a more general level, the analysis depicted explains the behavior and the formation of non-derived simple nouns in Italian.

Published online: 24 November 2010
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.2.11lam

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Cited by 4 other publications

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2018. Articles of Italian unite! Italian definite articles without allomorphy. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 63:3 ► pp. 359 ff.

Kučerová, Ivona

2018. ɸ-Features at the Syntax-Semantics Interface: Evidence from Nominal Inflection. Linguistic Inquiry 49:4 ► pp. 813 ff.

Lahrouchi, Mohamed & Rachid Ridouane

2016. On diminutives and plurals in Moroccan Arabic. Morphology 26:3-4 ► pp. 453 ff.

Vender, Maria, Federica Mantione, Silvia Savazzi, Denis Delfitto & Chiara Melloni

2017. Inflectional morphology and dyslexia: Italian children’s performance in a nonword pluralization task. Annals of Dyslexia 67:3 ► pp. 401 ff.

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