Recent Morphology Explorations in Romance Languages

According to a traditional vision, natural languages are systems that combine words in sequences to which syntax gives a logical organization. In such systems, words would only provide the vocabulary content, while the rules of syntax would be responsible for the interpretive level of the sentence. Actually, in most languages, the syntax is fused with, or fully manifested by, the morphology, to the effect that the functional morphemes such as inflections and derivational affixes are crucial in realizing the relational and semantic properties of the sentence. The recent history of morphological studies has put forward the idea, adopted by some of the current literature, that morphology is a sort of ornamental property, somehow a superficial imperfection of language. In this line, Aronoff (1998, p. 416) claims that ‘morphology is inherently unnatural, it is a disease, a pathology of language’. This conclusion could be supported by discrepancies between morphology and syntax, such as, for instance, the lack of isomorphism between morphological and syntactic junctures discussed by Aronoff (1998). Therefore, morphology would have an arbitrary nature distant from the core properties of language. In fact, this view appears simply speculative. If things were that way, we would have to ask ourselves why language should be engaged in obscuring or complicating the relationship between interpretive (C-I) and sensory–motor (SM) systems with non-isomorphism and syncretism.

Be that as it may, an adequate theory of language cannot leave out the way morphological structures realize (parts of) the sentence. In the standard generative framework, inflectional morphemes are combined by head movement, typically in the verb inflection. Thus, for instance, the second plural of the Italian present lava-te ‘you(pl) wash’ is obtained by moving lava-, the lexical element, to the inflectional head T/I, where –te is taken on and checked by the features of the subject. Therefore, the inflected form is the result of syntactic derivation, construed in the terms of the probe–goal mechanism required by the uninterpretable φ-features of T, of which Baker’s (1988) mirror principle expresses a well-known empirical generalization. Halle and Marantz (1993, 1994) conclude that morphology operates on the terminal nodes and categories fixed by syntax, even if morphological structures require formal adjustments. Recent works have pursued this idea, coming to assume that no special morphological component exists and that morphology is part of the syntactic computation. (Manzini and Savoia 2011, 2018; Baldi and Savoia 2021; Collins and Kayne 2023). If so, the relationship between syntax and morphology is mediated by the content of lexical items that the merge rule combines, yielding syntactic objects. Interestingly, there is a link between the hypothesis that excludes the special status of morphology and Chomsky’s (2019, 2021) criticism of ad hoc formal tools in the formation of inflected words such as head-raising and late insertion, the keystone of DM, defined by Chomsky (2019, p. 267) as ‘[…] completely unacceptable, because it involves operations that are complex, unmotivated, […]’.

As for the relevance of Romance languages, we know that they are a privileged field of inquiry for morphology, both for their wide and fine-grained morphological variation and for their inflectional richness in the nominal and verbal domains. The Romance varieties provide material for all fundamental issues of morphological research, both from a theoretical and an external perspective, as shown by the studies contained in this volume. It is reasonable to think that a vocabulary-based framework, including roots and inflectional elements, is the most intuitive and adequate way of characterizing morphology (Bobaljik 2002). Nevertheless, descriptive approaches based on secondary constructs such as paradigms or abstract patterns (Williams 1994; Maiden 2018) can contribute to highlighting interesting formal and conceptual aspects of morphology. Furthermore, external approaches may provide us with some knowledge of the relationship between morphological structures and human cognition, and between morphological patterns and social and cultural meanings.

The contributions presented in this volume can be subdivided into two main groups, according to their descriptive and external or theoretical orientation. In the first group, the paper ‘(Extreme) Polymorphism in Occitan Verb Morphology’ by Franck Floricic brings to light functional and cognitive aspects of morphological mechanisms. This study provides us with a striking example of polymorphism with regard to coexistent paradigms for the same tense in Occitan. The author, an expert and experienced researcher in the field of the syntactic variation phenomena, attentive to the most subtle aspects of linguistic use, illustrates a very interesting set of polymorphic paradigms drawn from the Atlas Linguistique du Languedoc occidental, a situation that ‘can be observed at any moment in the life of language and it may be considered as a cue of transitional stages in language development and evolution’. If the multiplication of forms for the same content appears to be anti-economic from a cognitive point of view, the diachronic change seems to overcome this problem. But a question remains, perhaps the most interesting one, that of why polymorphism is created. An old question that inspired the origins of modern linguistics.

Can languages create social imagery? Some authors, such as Judith Butler or Michel Foucault highlight the performative effect of vocabulary and discriminatory linguistic expressions referring to the nature and public position of persons. Morphological systems are a key factor in these interpretive mechanisms, as discussed by Jennifer Marisa Kaplan in ‘Pluri-Grammars for Pluri-Genders: Competing Gender Systems in the Nominal Morphology of Non-Binary French’. Language inclusivity is a matter that, in the case of English cultural and linguistic tradition, has a history and now is faced in many Romance languages. The nominal morphology of French provides an interesting field for testing a non-binary solution, based on different methodologies, the compounding approach and the systematic approach, with the latter affecting the phonological expression of the gender markers.

Elisa Di Domenico addresses the relation between object clitics and syntax in ‘Object Clitic Reduplication in Perugino’. Perugino admits the reduplication of OCls in restructuring sentences with modal verbs. How many slots for the object clitics are available in a sentence? This, discussion compares the monoclausal and biclausal analysis of restructuring sentences leading to the conclusion that because both proclisis and enclisis are admitted, any structural solution must provide two possible positions for object clitics, suggesting that the process from proclisis to enclisis is at an intermediate stage. The analysis treats the behavior of clitics within the classic cartographic framework where clitics, that is, the morphological instantiation of arguments, impose constraints on the syntactic structure. An experimental approach to mixed compounds in Italian–German bilinguals is presented in ‘Mixed Compounds: Where Morphology Interfaces with Syntax’ by Gloria Cocchi and Cristina Pierantozzi. The two languages differ in the position of the head in the compounds, with the consequence that mixed forms, while possible, are still subject to constraints in their acceptability. The grammaticality judgments of participants seem to depend on the language of the clause and/or the native language of the speaker. More generally, mixing is preferred when the two languages have similar syntactic structures, including at the level below the word.

The subsequent articles apply different approaches, all in the framework of generative theory, and give rise to a sort of discussion concerning the nature of morphology. In ‘Romance Root Suppletion and Cumulative Exponence: Fusion, Pruning, Spanning’, Natascha Pomino and Eva-Maria Remberger address allomorphy within the conceptual model of DM. The data examined regard the suppletive distribution of different roots in the paradigm of ‘go’ in Romance languages. In the case of substitution phenomena, DM resorts to the fusion/pruning rules and the subset principle as tools functional to late insertion. The type of suppletion investigated, which involves sub-sets of person and tense features, induces the authors to propose a particular approach in order to treat the form–function discrepancies. In fact, if the pruning of the intermediate elements preceded the insertion of suppletive roots, φ-features would not be able to select the root. The authors conclude that vocabulary items are inserted ‘not just in one terminal node at a time, but also in spans of terminal nodes that are in a complementary relation with each other.’

Ludovico Franco and Paolo Lorusso in ‘Derivational Relators in Italian’ assume a very different direction. They analyze two types of relational adjectives, with (freddo) polare ‘polar cold’ and concorso universitario ‘university competition’ in the first case, and terreno acquoso ‘water soil’ and bevanda alcolica ‘alcoholic beverage’ in the other one, which can be traced back to two types of inclusion relation, generally expressed by the prepositions di ‘of’, ‘included in’ and con ‘with’, ‘includes’. The authors assume that the denominal affixes forming these adjectives are ‘the derivational counterpart of oblique case/adpositions’. In addition to the interesting intuition regarding the interpretation of these adjectives and their internal structure, we find a clear proposal supporting a unified treatment of syntactic and morphological facts on the basis of the same level of representation.

Nanosyntax and its capacity to insert lexical material over a span of terminal nodes inspired the article ‘The Spell-Out of Non-Heads in Spanish Compounds: A Nanosyntactic Approach’ by Bárbara Marqueta Gracia. The work regards a sample of 1250 compounds documented in contemporary Spanish written corpora. These compounds include both I- and O-ending stems and words spelling out compound non-heads, as in oj-I-azul ‘blue-eyed’, danz-o-terapia, ‘dance therapy’, and other types corresponding to different syntactic relations. The author aims to ‘provide empirical support for syntacticist approaches to compounding’; in this sense, nanosyntax allows the formation of compounds by including sequences of syntactic positions and categories in morphological forms.

Leonardo M. Savoia and Benedetta Baldi in ‘Root, Thematic Vowels and Inflectional Exponents in Verbs: A Morpho-Syntactic Analysis’ investigate the internal morphological structures of verbal systems in Italo–Romance dialects, focusing on the thematic vowel (TV) and its interaction with agreement morphology. The authors criticize the DM approach where morphology is an auxiliary and expensive post-syntactic component that conveys information separated from its original locus (cf. Embick and Noyer 2001). An adequate account is reached by assuming that the morphology is governed by the same computational rules as the syntax, where the operation merge combines fully interpretable sub-word elements, forming complex inflected words. With regard to the TV, the hypothesis that it corresponds to a variable associated with nominal features is discussed.

The neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic literature have shown that the morphemic decomposition of complex words and the semantic categories expressed by morphological exponents are a part of linguistic knowledge (among many others, see Badecker et al. 1990; Regel et al. 2019). The ability of children to recognize and handle inflectional morphemes is also evidenced by the learnability of polysynthetic word morphology, acquired without particular difficulty (Kelly et al. 2014). As argued in this introduction, an approach based on items endowed with semantic content, including roots and inflectional/derivational morphemes, appears to provide interesting results. In this framework, the cognitive space of morphological units fixed by conceptual categories such as referential properties, part–whole relation, spatial coordinates, cause, etc., is a crucial subject of research.