The decomposition of Somali Nouns

The goal of this paper is to understand the internal organization of Somali nouns. More precisely, I propose an analysis of the inflectional markers, i.e. the exponents of gender, number and syntactic case. Within a syntactic approach to noun formation, I show that a list of basic exponents can be reached throughout the phonological deconstruction of the surface forms. In addition, I argue that each phonological exponent corresponds to a unique morpho-syntactic category. On a more general level, the analysis depicted illustrates the behavior and the formation of basic and non-derived nouns in Somali, regardless the notion of "noun class"

The decomposition of Somali nouns

Abstract The goal of this paper is to understand the internal organization of Somali nouns. More precisely, I propose an analysis of the inflectional markers, i.e. the exponents of gender, number and syntactic case. Within a syntactic approach to noun formation, I show that a list of basic exponents can be reached throughout the phonological deconstruction of the surface forms. In addition, I argue that each phonological exponent corresponds to a unique morpho-syntactic category. On a more general level, the analysis depicted illustrates the behavior and the formation of basic and non-derived nouns in Somali, regardless the notion of "noun class"

The Romance plural isogloss and linguistic change: A comparative study of Romance nouns

International audienceRomance nouns show a well-known morphological isogloss. There are two groups of languages: those pluralizing by suffixing -s (such as Spanish), and those pluralizing by changing the quality of the final vowel (such as Italian). In this paper, I propose an explanation of this isogloss. More precisely, I argue that the cross-linguistic diversity within Romance depends on morpho-phonological parameters on the structure of the noun. These parameters consist of language-particular restrictions on the form of the (nominal) roots and the exponents of gender and number

Constructing Languages to Explore Theoretical Principles

The construction of languages has always been related to linguistics. Most of these initiatives address real scientific questions but from a non-academic point of view. The fact that Ferdinand de Saussure's own brother, René de Saussure, wrote a theoretical essay on the construction of the Esperanto word (de Saussure 1914) is an amusing illustration of this. In this paper, we propose a method inspired by experimental archaeology. The experiment consists in trying to obtain an artifact similar to the one observed using this or that construction method. An equivalent approach in linguistics would be the generation of linguistic systems based on explicitly formulated principles. Trying to generate similar systems pushes the linguist to explicitly define the principles that are needed and to explore all their consequences. In this context, we show that the use of notions induced by the observation of natural languages leads to a certain degree of circularity and that it is therefore more interesting to explore a priori principles based on very general assumptions

A Classless Analysis of Italian Nouns and their Theme-Vowel Alternations

The decompositional, non-lexicalist, approach to word-structure and the theory of roots have proven highly rewarding. One grey area, however, comes from Romance since, rather than roots, the word structure primitive appears to be the stem: root + ‘stem-formative/theme vowel’. Regardless, there have been perspicacious decompositional accounts of Italian, however these are still marred by the large number of morphological/item-specific irregularities, motivating arbitrary noun classes. Additionally, there are roots that do not inflect: consonant-final and vowel-final forms when these are oxytonic or loanwords. Given these irregularities, previous analyses in Italian have included the use of lexical exceptions and class features. We challenge the use of class features in generating the attested patterns (and their exceptions). Instead, we propose a new categorisation of root-shapes, which, when combined with the exponents of nominal inflection, produce the correct surface pairings, as well as the non-alternating forms. In our analysis, there is no diacritic or special marking of lexical exceptions, all forms inflect regularly in accordance to their phonological shape. This requires the innovation of one new mechanism (Inhibition), but we back it up by showing that it leads to an unexpected beneficial prediction that solves a long-standing problem associated with Raddoppiamento Sintattico (RS)

The English “Arab Rule” without feet

International audienceThis paper deals with English vowel reduction and focuses on what is generally referred to as the Arab Rule (Ross 1972 i.a.). Vowels tend to reduce if the preceding syllable is light, whereas they do not reduce if the preceding syllable is heavy. Our purpose is twofold: first, based on the scrutiny of Wells (2008), we evaluate the efficiency of the Arab Rule and show that is empirically verified. Second, we propose an analysis of blocking contexts couched within CVCV phonology (Lowenstamm 1996). We use two central notions such as Government and Licensing, and show that vowel reduction only applies to "governing-and-governable" vowels

Internally-structured morphemes at the Phonology-Syntax interface: evidence from the Bosnian declensional system

Poster présenté aux Décembrettes 7, Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, 8 décembre 2010</p

A morphophonological analysis of the velar insert in Italian verbs

International audienceThis paper analyzes a particular group of Italian irregular verbs that are characterized by the insertion of [g] between the root and the inflectional markers. Despite the apparent unetymological status of such a velar insert (Rohlfs 1968), it is shown that the allomorphy of the root depends on the internal organization of the segmental material with respect to a fixed template made of a strict alternation of onsets (C) and nuclei (V). The analyses are couched within the CVCV framework (Lowenstamm 1996; Scheer 2004) and are consistent with a syntactic approach to word-formation such as Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993; Embick 2010)

La structure phonologique des marqueurs flexionnels de l’imparfait du français

International audienc