Progressive metaphony in the Abruzzese dialect of Teramo

Abstract

This contribution deals with metaphony, an assimilatory process that has targeted stressed vowels in the evolution from Latin to Romance, particularly widespread in Italo-Romance. First, progressive metaphony is tackled, an understudied type of metaphony that concerns only restricted areas of the Italian peninsula located in the Abruzzi and Molise. A description of the process and a reconstruction of the vowel-system of the dialect that best instantiates this phenomenon are provided, followed by a formal account. Both feature-based and element-based analyses are presented, discussed and compared. Then, the inferences from the analysis of progressive metaphony are tested on data concerning regressive metaphony. Finally, the hints gathered from these analyses are exploited to advance an alternative, tentative proposal on the general workings of the metaphonic process, where the element A and the notion of head have a key role. This proposition helps answering some questions that are left open when metaphony is looked at through the usual perspective, and suggests some new paths of research.

Chapter 20. Metaphony as magnetism

“…(12) @ ⊃A We then get an analysis that is exactly parallel to the one in D'Alessandro and van Oostendorp ( 2016), but with the advantage that we have given a clearer representational reason why the plural affix can behave in this way, without having to introduce a constraint ranking or some other grammatical device that is specific to this morpheme. Like in the previous account, we still need to understand why the suffix [a] which is formed in this way only shows up if it is not peripheral, but we can account for this by relying on general phonotactic considerations of the language: also etymological [a] only shows up under those conditions (Passino, 2016). This is of course the same kind of representation we have given to harmony, albeit that in this case it is the apparent trigger of the harmony (the suffix) that has the specification to attract the |A| element.…”