Morphological complexity without abstractness: Italo-Romance metaphony
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Michele Loporcaro
Abstract
This paper considers some selected cases of stressed vowel alternations arisen from the application of metaphony in Italo-Romance dialects. While similar cases are often reported in the literature, the ones picked up here stand out because they resist, for several reasons, any analysis treating metaphony as a synchronic phonological rule (albeit opacized), deriving the surface alternants from abstract underlying representations. Such analyses, as standardly practiced in the Generative paradigm from the 1960s to this day, would face insurmountable problems in accounting for the morphological paradigms that capitalize on the metaphonic alternants putting them into service as exponents of morphosyntactic categories. Thus, the study of morphological complexity yields supporting evidence for phonological theories like Natural Phonology, which severely constrains the amount of abstractness permitted to underlying representations.
© School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland, 2011
Articles in the same Issue
- Part one. Complexity in Natural Linguistics. Guest edited by Wolfgang U. Dressler
- The rise of complexity in inflectional morphology
- Morphological complexity without abstractness: Italo-Romance metaphony
- A "natural" approach to text complexity
- Towards naturalness scales of pragmatic complexity
- Part two. Regular articles
- A current trend or a historic remnant? The case of a Lovari verb-forming suffix
- Two communicative levels and twofold illocutionary force in televised political debates
- Common Semantic Denominators of the Internal Vowel Alternation System in English
- Indexical pronouns: Generic uses as clues to their structure
- A comparative study of morphosyntactic and discourse errors of intermediate and advanced EFL learners’ writing
- On the phonetic instability of the Polish rhotic /r/
- Lexical and functional decomposition in syntax: A view from phonology
Articles in the same Issue
- Part one. Complexity in Natural Linguistics. Guest edited by Wolfgang U. Dressler
- The rise of complexity in inflectional morphology
- Morphological complexity without abstractness: Italo-Romance metaphony
- A "natural" approach to text complexity
- Towards naturalness scales of pragmatic complexity
- Part two. Regular articles
- A current trend or a historic remnant? The case of a Lovari verb-forming suffix
- Two communicative levels and twofold illocutionary force in televised political debates
- Common Semantic Denominators of the Internal Vowel Alternation System in English
- Indexical pronouns: Generic uses as clues to their structure
- A comparative study of morphosyntactic and discourse errors of intermediate and advanced EFL learners’ writing
- On the phonetic instability of the Polish rhotic /r/
- Lexical and functional decomposition in syntax: A view from phonology
