The nature of phonological conditioning in Latin inflectional allomorphy

Abstract

This paper offers a comprehensive analysis of the inflectional morphology of Latin in terms of the patterns of allomorphy and the environments governing the distribution of allomorphs. It is demonstrated that all the attested allomorphic alternations can be described as functions of a vocalic scale, practically the sonority scale of vowels plus the undifferentiated class of consonants as the least sonorous extreme. The distribution of allomorphs along the vocalic scale crucially displays the property of contiguity, i.e., the subsections of the scale that trigger one particular allomorph are uninterrupted.

The lowering of high vowels before [r] in Latin

“…As is explained in much greater detail elsewhere (Cser 2015(Cser , 2020, the highly varied allomorphic patterns one finds in Latin verbal as well as nominal inflection can be reduced to a series of binary alternations conditioned by the sonority of the stem-final segment. In verbal inflection nearly all cases of allomorphy fall into one of two types.…”

“…One is that there are so many problems surrounding it (presented below in section 2) that even its reality has been seriously doubted by some. The other is that pervasive vocalic alternations in the Latin morphological system (presented below in section 3.1 and, more fully, in Cser 2015Cser , 2020 appear to derive from it. It is therefore the goal of this paper to critically review the various descriptions of this putative change in order to understand how exactly it unfolded and how it relates to the attested morphophonological alternations; but, more importantly, it is also my goal here to explain why the alternations in question are not uniform in terms of the relation between environments and alternants.…”