Phenomena in Romance verb paradigms: Syncretism, order of inflectional morphemes and thematic vowel

Abstract

This article aims to propose a treatment of the internal morphological organization of words, based on the idea that morphology is part of syntactic computation. We disagree with Distributed Morphology model, whereby morphology is identified with a post-syntactic component conveying an information ‘separated from the original locus of that information in the phrase marker’ (Embick and Noyer 2001: 557) by rules manipulating syntactic nodes. We also consider inadequate the costly and complex syntactic structures that cartographic approach maps into inflectional strings. We pursue a different conceptualization assuming that morphology is governed by the same rules and principles of syntax. Sub-word elements, including inflections, thematic exponents and clitics, are fully interpretable and enter (pair-)merge operations (in the sense of Chomsky 2020a,b, 2021) according to their content, giving rise to complex words.

Enclisis, mesoclisis and inflection in Italo-Romance varieties: A minimalist analysis

“…In these dialects, the inflectional paradigm is reduced (cf. Baldi and Savoia 2022b). In Trecate's dialect, we have seen in Section 1 that the 1 st and 2 nd plural have specialized forms only in the present indicative, while in the imperfect and conditional in ( 6)-( 7) -u is extended to the whole plural paradigm, where the inclusion operator [⊆] subsumes all plural references; the distribution of SCls is different, and the SCl i is syncretic with the 1 st singular.…”

“…As to the nature of [plural], we identify it with the part-subset content (on the basis of Chierchia 1998), i.e. the inclusion operator [⊆], indicating that the argument can be partitioned into subsets (Manzini and Savoia 2011a, Savoia and Baldi 2022b. So, the exponent -u can be associated with this property; the SCl i, a definiteness marker, can also include the inclusion property, as in (9b).…”

“…The proposal that the TV corresponds to a nominal variable 'x', whose value is fixed by the subject has been formulated byManzini and Savoia (2005, 2007, 2011a and elaborated bySavoia and Baldi (2022b) in the analysis of the verbal systems. The idea is that the TV makes the root a predicate available to combine with the tense/aspectual/modal elements.…”