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10 - Phonological and Morphological Conditioning

from Part Three - Morphology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2022

By
Franck Floricic  and
Lucia Molinu
Edited by
Adam Ledgeway  and
Martin Maiden
Adam Ledgeway
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Martin Maiden
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

Phonology/phonetics and morphology interact in such a way as to render difficult any clear-cut dividing line between these subfields. Romanists have long observed that phonetics play a crucial role in language change. From this point of view there is nothing exceptional in the fact that phonetics/phonology may provide the system with the very substance of morphological oppositions. The number and the extension of the morphological processes amenable to phonetic principles in the Romance domain are so wide that only a few typical phenomena are treated in this chapter. Furthermore, it is not always evident how one can establish the extent to which a given morphological alternation is phonologically driven, whether we are dealing with a purely phonological phenomenon or whether we should recognize some lexical conditioning in the choice of the allomorphs. The examples discussed (allomorphy in the definite article, subject clitics and affixes, possessives, and the nominal, verbal, and adjectival stems) show that the phonetic impulse for a morphological alternation may no longer be transparent ; in other cases, the trigger of a given pattern is no longer available or can only be identified following a process of diachronic reconstruction.

Keywords

allomorphymorphologyphonologyinterfaceRomance languagescliticsaffixesstems
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics , pp. 321 - 345
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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References

Selected References

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