The irregular forms of the Italian “Passato Remoto”
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Andrea Calabrese
Abstract
Many Italian verbs display complex alternations involving regular/irregular stem forms in the simple past tense, the so-called Passato Remoto. Vogel (1994), Pirelli and Battista (2000), Maiden (2005, 2010) among many others, including traditional neo-grammarian and structuralist accounts, assume that the alternations found in the irregular forms of the Passato Remoto must be accounted for in terms of memorized stem and ending alternants. In this paper, I will argue instead that the best synchronic and diachronic analysis of these alternations involves notions such as roots, abstract morphemes, Readjustment Rules and Impoverishment as expected by the Distributed Morphology (DM) model (Halle and Marantz 1993; Embick 2010; Embick and Marantz 2008). There is no need for memorized stem alternants to account for them.
Abstract
Many Italian verbs display complex alternations involving regular/irregular stem forms in the simple past tense, the so-called Passato Remoto. Vogel (1994), Pirelli and Battista (2000), Maiden (2005, 2010) among many others, including traditional neo-grammarian and structuralist accounts, assume that the alternations found in the irregular forms of the Passato Remoto must be accounted for in terms of memorized stem and ending alternants. In this paper, I will argue instead that the best synchronic and diachronic analysis of these alternations involves notions such as roots, abstract morphemes, Readjustment Rules and Impoverishment as expected by the Distributed Morphology (DM) model (Halle and Marantz 1993; Embick 2010; Embick and Marantz 2008). There is no need for memorized stem alternants to account for them.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction vii
- A’-dependencies in French 1
- The irregular forms of the Italian “Passato Remoto” 17
- On the lack of stranded negated quantifiers and inverse scope of negation in Romance 59
- Evidence for the competition-based analysis of subjunctive obviation from relative and adverbial clauses in Italian 75
- Quotative expansions 93
- Datives, prepositions, and argument structure in Spanish 125
- A typology of agreement processes and its implications for language development 143
- On the syntax of focalizers in some Italo-Romance dialects 157
- The phonotactics of word-initial clusters in Romance 175
- Double object constructions in Spanish (and Catalan) revisited 193
- Cognitive economy, non-redundancy and typological primacy in L3 acquisition 217
- L1 acquisition of noun ellipsis in French and in Dutch 249
- Index 267
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction vii
- A’-dependencies in French 1
- The irregular forms of the Italian “Passato Remoto” 17
- On the lack of stranded negated quantifiers and inverse scope of negation in Romance 59
- Evidence for the competition-based analysis of subjunctive obviation from relative and adverbial clauses in Italian 75
- Quotative expansions 93
- Datives, prepositions, and argument structure in Spanish 125
- A typology of agreement processes and its implications for language development 143
- On the syntax of focalizers in some Italo-Romance dialects 157
- The phonotactics of word-initial clusters in Romance 175
- Double object constructions in Spanish (and Catalan) revisited 193
- Cognitive economy, non-redundancy and typological primacy in L3 acquisition 217
- L1 acquisition of noun ellipsis in French and in Dutch 249
- Index 267
