Remarks on the Role of the Perfect Participle in Italian Morphology and on its History

Abstract

Since (Aronoff, Mark. 1994. Morphology by itself. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press), the disparate morphosyntactic roles that past participle forms have in Latin (and Italian) morphology have played a central role in arguing for morphomic approaches. In this article, I will propose an alternative analysis of the special behavior of these participle forms in Distributed Morphology (DM, Halle Morris, & Alec Marantz. 1993. Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection. In Kenneth Hale & Samuel Jay Keyser (eds.), The view from building 20: Essays in linguistics in honor of Sylvain Bromberger, 111–176. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.). In particular, I will propose that morphological spell-out, as a first stage of the PF derivation, includes morphological repairs triggered by abstract “morphomic” constraints. These repairs can insert “ornamental” pieces – structures that are not motivated syntactically or semantically but only morphologically – to mediate the interface between abstract syntactico-semantic structures and surface PF construction. I will demonstrate the role that these repairs play in accounting for the surface convergence between perfect and passive participle forms, and adjectival stative ones, and for the appearance of past participles in nominalizations. The article ends with an analysis of Latin past participle morphology focusing on its historical development. The first part of this analysis deals with the development of Latin verbal structure from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and in particular with the development of “ornamental” thematic vowels. It then turns to a brief investigation of the historical development of the Latin past participle exponent /-t-/ from PIE adjectival suffix *-tó-, and of the PIE agentive and action/result nominal suffixes *-tér/tor, *-ti-, *-tu, *-men-(to)-. This will lead to a discussion of Latin nominalizations, the supine and the future participle and a possible explanation of why they contain participial morphology.

What learning Latin verbal morphology tells us about morphological theory

“…Next, Steriade (2016) revives early assumptions as a challenge to Aronoff and Embick and Halle in introducing a violable constraint analysis in which the past participle's form does carry a meaning after all and the t-deverbals are based on the form of the past participle. Most recently, Calabrese (2020) proposes an analysis most similar to Embick and Halle's, but agrees with Steriade (2016) in assigning semantics to the PPtc.…”

“…Section 4 applies the Tolerance Principle to the corpus to work out which past participles are productively derived and evaluates the past participle and t-deverbal correspondence against the inherent sparsity of the corpus. Section 5 then summarizes four theoretical treatments in light of this analysis, namely the lexeme-based account from Aronoff (1994), where Latin is invoked to motivate a notion of stems; the Distributed Morphology accounts of Embick (2000) and Embick and Halle (2005), and of Calabrese (2020), which use the same data to argue against that notion of stems; and the Similarity-Based Syncretism treatment from Steriade (2016), which presents a phonology-based alternative to the shared assumptions between the previous accounts. Finally, taking stock of all of these results, Section 6 sketches what a stem-based treatment that accounts for both the diachronic evidence and acquisition results may look like and explicates its desirable properties.…”

“…The forms of the past participle are particularly varied, and they share their phonological forms, any irregularities or suppletion included, with a semantically diverse set of future active participles, agent, and event nouns, adverbs, and other deverbals, raising questions about the relationship between form and meaning. As such, analyses of the past participle have been put forth as positive evidence in favor of several disparate morphological frameworks (Matthews 1972;Lieber 1980;Mel'čuk 1982;Aronoff 1994;Embick 2000; Embick and Halle 2005;Steriade 2016;Calabrese 2020).…”

“…Empirical coverage still reigns supreme, so part of this requires a consistent outlook on the data. However, prior accounts of the Latin verb have used different data sets and analysis methods ranging from corpus and lexicon searches (Steriade 2016) to dictionary counts (Aronoff 1994) to unspecified sources (Embick 2000;Embick and Halle 2005;Calabrese 2020). That said, a consistent data set is still not enough.…”

Fifty shades of morphosyntactic microvariation

“…In fact, in many Italian dialects, the thematic vowel is missing in auxiliaries. See for example the following cases that compare the use of avere as a lexical verb and as an auxiliary: To account for what happens in this case, Calabrese (2019Calabrese ( , 2020a proposes that this is an instance of an abstract morphomic condition. Abstract morphomic conditions, according to him, introduce ornamental nodes such as Thematic Vowels but also what appears to be syntactically void functional heads.…”