This book contains a peer-reviewed selection of papers presented at the 46th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 46) that took place in April 2016 at Stony Brook University (SUNY), New York. The most current research and debates on bilingualism, historical linguistics, morphology,… read more
These articles provide new explorations into phonological patterns attested in the minor Romance languages (‘dialects’) spoken in Italy. The goal of this book is both theoretical and empirical. First, it aims to introduce non-Italianists to the phonological structures of the Italian dialects,… read more
In many Romance varieties, the verb in imperative verb + (postverbal) pronoun phrases retains primary stress: Italian/Spanish: [kómpra]/[kómpra-melo] ‘buy!’/‘buy me it!’. However, in others varieties, stress in these phrases may be realized on a different syllable: [kompra-meló], [kompra-mélo],… read more
The goal of this paper is to describe the distribution and to explain the nature of the vowels that appear in preverbal position in main questions in many Northern Italian dialects. We use data primarily from the town of Donceto in the province of Piacenza, as well as data from many other Northern… read more
In this paper, we discuss preverbal vocalic segments in interrogative and declarative sentences. Their distribution depends on the type of subject (1sg, 1pl, 2pl vs 2sg, 3sg, 3pl), the presence of other preverbal clitics, and the verb tense (present vs present perfect). We show that two different… read more
Why do geminate consonants frequently appear in borrowed words when the foreign form does not contain a geminate? In this paper I review previous approaches to this problem, and suggest that they are insufficient in accounting for consonant length contrasts in English loan words in North American… read more
In this paper we have identified six Romance patterns in which the presence of enclitic pronouns affects the stress assignment of the verb. We show that previous phonological analyses of these patterns that make reference to different incorporation sites within the prosodic hierarchy or… read more
