I'm excited to announce that the fifth (and final) meeting of the Morphology & Syntax workshop this quarter will take place this Friday, December 6th, from 12:30 - 2:30 PM CT in Classics 405 or online (link). We are happy to (virtually) welcome Prof. Shanti Ulfsbjorninn (Memorial University of Newfoundland). Title and abstract follow:
Resolving the Allomorphic Mess of the Italian Irregular Infinitives: a classless, non-morphomic, item-and-arrangement analysis
In recent years there have been efforts to produce fully modular, feed-forward, item-and-arrangement analyses that do without dedicated morphological tools (Collins & Kayne 2023). This is also (at least a desideratum) of syntax-all-the-way-down approaches such as Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993; Harley & Noyer 1998; Embick 2010). From this same perspective, Lampitelli & Ulfsbjorninn (2023) problematize syntactically invisible class features from a minimalist perspective, since they are not phonological features either. Also, there has been a recent resurgence of morphomes: systematic morphological “identities” in paradigms, that cannot be mapped onto syntactic or semantic natural classes (Maiden 2004; Herce 2023 cf. Aronoff 1994). In the following presentation, we will explore the Irregular Infinitives of Italian: -urre, -orre, -arre, and their finite conjugations, with their multifarious and problematic (possibly even paradoxical) allomorphy. We will then land on an item-and-arrangement analysis of all the forms of all the paradigms, using only the autosegmental tools of Strict CV phonology, thereby eschewing class and morphomes.
We hope to see you all there! As always, if you want more information about the M&S schedule or other general information about the workshop, please see our website!