Ladin (ISO 639-3: lld) is a Romance language spoken in the Italian Central-Eastern Alps by a community of about 30,000 speakers (Dell’Aquila 2010). The classification of Ladin within Western Romance has been the subject of a long-lasting scientific and at times ideological debate, particularly because at the end of the 19th century the region was contested between the new-born Italian state and the Habsburg empire. The varieties of Ladin share phonetic-phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical features with the other languages spoken in the Central-Eastern Alps, such as Friulian and Romansh, thus leading to the identification of the Rhaeto-Romance group (Haiman & Benincà 1992). However, in Ladin there are still many linguistic phenomena that connect it to the Romance dialects of Northern Italy. Therefore, a clear assignment of Ladin to a group is by no means a simple and uncontroversial operation (Salvi 2016).

No abstract

Both phonologically conditioned suppletive allomorphy (PCSA) and multiple exponence (ME) involve one-to-many mapping between morphosyntactic information and phonological representations. Though they are usually viewed as separate phenomena, the plural marking of Lower Jubba Maay exhibits properties of both PCSA and ME, indicating that they are inherently related. This paper argues that PCSA, ME, and other types of exponence can be analyzed in a unified way given two GEN functions and two novel exponence constraints, i.e. Max-∀LE(F) and Max-∃LE(F), which are used to quantify the number of exponents that are realized in the surface. The proposed mechanism can predict the full range of typology.

No abstract

In this paper we examine the phonotactics of consonant clusters in Moenat Ladin in terms of their markedness and temporal coordination. Moenat Ladin word-initial clusters include sibilant-stop (SC), stop-/r/ (Cr), stop-/l/ (Cl), and sibilant-stop-/r/ (SCr). However, despite SC and Cl sequences being well-formed in Moenat, sibilant-stop-/l/ (SCl) clusters are almost entirely unattested. We hypothesize that the rarity of SCl clusters owes to a cumulative markedness effect that arises from the combination of marked structures involved in SC and Cl sequences. Our investigation centers chiefly on the status of word-initial SC sequences in Moenat Ladin, for which we hypothesize that the sibilant is organized external to the syllable onset. This hypothesis is supported by an acoustic study of temporal coordination of Moenat, employing the methodology of Ruthan et al. (2019) and Durvasula et al. (2021). We propose a formal account in Harmonic Grammar (Legendre et al. 1990) such that SCl clusters exceed a markedness threshold in contrast to permissible clusters. In this account we employ a model of phonotactics in which a phonotactically non-permissible cluster is modeled as selection of the null parse (e.g. Albright 2008, 2012, Breiss & Albright 2022).