Locality effects in Italian verbal morphology

The paper deals with the irregular morphology in Italian perfect and past participle forms. In these forms, one observes a correlation between presence vs. absence of regular morphology and presence vs. absence of thematic vowels. The paper argues that athematic forms undergo a special operation removing the thematic vowel. In this way, the root and the Tense morpheme come to be in positions that are local to each other, thus allowing morpho-phonological interactions between them. Deverbal nominalizations built on the past participle forms are also discussed in the paper. Extending the analysis to these other forms will require a refinement of morphological locality principles.