Friday, May 27 @ 3pm, Karen Landahl Center for Linguistics Research

“Modeling variation and change in radoppiamento sintattico“

Abstract:

The external sandhi phenomenon of raddoppiamento sintattico (RS) in Italian has been a prominent topic in phonology for decades. While the existing theoretical literature treats RS as a regular phonological process, recent research has found that there is considerable variation in the realization of RS in two different domains: across dialects, due to diachronic change (Loporcaro 1996, 1997, 2001), and within dialectics, due to phonetic conditioning factors (Campos-Astorkiza 2004; Hajek et al. 2007; Stevens et al. 2002; Stevens and Hajek 2004, 2005, 2006).     This talk seeks to a) demonstrate that these two sources of variation are in fact interrelated, and that any analysis of one without the other is necessarily incomplete; and b) propose a new constraint-based analysis in which the phonology is crucially conditioned by phonetic factors.  Specifically, I argue that a model of partially ordered constraints (Anttila 1997, Anttila and Cho 1998) successfully predicts variation in individual grammars while simultaneously capturing the attested path of diachronic sound change between grammars.  To account for the facts concerning variation in the phonetic implementation of RS, I argue that the constraints themselves can be formulated as contextual markedness constraints based on the availability of perceptual cues, in the spirit of Licensing-by-Cue (Steriade 1997).    Thus, without sacrificing theoretical simplicity, this model is able to capture the empirical facts about RS far more successfully than prior analyses.