Ling Lunch: Dr Shanti Ulfsbjorninn "Compounding and Proclisis in Italian and English: Morphological or phonological variation" | 9 March 2016
9 March 2016
Time: 8:50am
Venue: Laws 119
University of Lyon III/UCL
"Compounding and Proclisis in Italian and English: Morphological or phonological variation"
English and Italian proclisis and compounding are systematically different. This talk aims to attribute the differences to a phonological condition on the mapping of morpho-syntactic structure to phonological structure.
Kaye (1995) shows that the phonological structure of words is either non-analytic: [AB] or analytic: [[A]B] or [[A][B]]. The phonological bracketing is not necessarily isochronous with a form's morphosyntactic composition. Indeed, the following mappings are attested: one-one ([cat]), many-many: ([[cat]s] and [[steel][bridge]]), many-one ([parental]), and one-many ([[anec][dote]]).
English allows proclisis to produce both analytic and non-analytic mappings: [subaltern] 'subaltern', [['sub][,script]] 'subscript' (Harris ms.). Meanwhile, Italian proclisis only generates non-analytic structures: [sub'ak:weo] subacqueo 'underwater', [sudʒ:a'tʃɛnte] suggiacente (cf. Eng. [[,sʌb]['dʒeɪsənʔ]]) 'subjacent' (Russo and Ulfsbjorninn 2015).
This generalises as a phonological mapping condition: right-headed root merger must map to a non-analytic domain: [AB]. This condition predicts, apparently correctly, the absence of Italian right-headed compounds: (cf. uomo ragno 'spiderman'). In fact, even forms directly calqued from romance have the reverse order: agrodolce [sweet-sour] 'sweet (n) sour', dolce-amaro [sweet-bitter] 'bittersweet'.
Radimský (2006, 2013) mistakenly assumes that Italian productive compounding has become right-headed (in analogy to English); however, his examples constitute a relatively closed class of proclitics: radio-, porno-, video-, auto-, ciclo-. In fact, their prosody reveals a non-analytic structure: [AB], just as our phonological generalisation predicts. Moreover, our phonological condition is proven by Italian mirror-compounds: radio-giornale ~ giornale radio 'radio news bulletin'. Of these, the left-headed variant is analytic:[[gior(nà:le)] [(rà:dio)]] (cf. uomo ragno), while the 'innovative' right-headed variant is non-analytic: [radiogior(nà:le)] (cf. Alabama).
The morpho-syntax of both languages is free to merge roots from left and right, but in Italian there is a further requirement on the mapping to phonology. This difference probably reduces to a wider differences of footing between Germanic (multiple feet per domain) and Romance (one foot per domain).