Missing inflectional features and missing exponents in DP-internal agreement asymmetries

Abstract

This paper focuses on different types of agreement asymmetries within the DP in which postnominal modifiers exhibit full agreement while in prenominal modifiers agreement can fail in different ways. The main lines of the optimality-theoretic proposal in Bonet, Lloret & Mascaró (2015) are followed, but it is shown, through a comparison of two Northern Italian varieties, that their constraint set cannot account for varieties of Friulian, where the plural exponent fails to surface in plural contexts. It is argued that one of their constraints must be split into two separate ones, a strictly phonological constraint, Max(segment), on the one hand, and, on the other, a constraint on exponence, Max-M[F], proposed by Wolf (2008).

The morphosyntactic structure of number in Italian and Albanian. High and low plurals

“…5 Languages like Spanish which only have high plurals are predicted to have no plural class comparable to -a plurals. This prediction is not available under Bonet's (2018) proposal. I return to this line of argument in section 3.…”

“…However, in languages like Italian (11a), vocalic inflections alternate according to both gender and number, inviting the conclusion that plural is associated with the lower Class position and therefore externalized together with gender. Furthermore, the two plural morphologies (namely the vocalic plural of Italian and the -s plural of Spanish) can combine, as in Friulian (11c) (Bonet 2018;Savoia et al 2018).…”