ASYMMETRIES IN THE POSITIONING OF PLURAL MORPHOLOGY IN DPS IN -S AND -I SYSTEMS. A ROMANCE COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

A small but significant stream of formal work on Romance has addressed partial distributions of plural morphology in the DP, specifically -s, whereas gender and inflectional class morphology is present on all members of the DP (Costa and Figuereido Silva 2002, Bonet et al. 2015). Italian varieties/varieties spoken in Italy provide relevant data for this phenomenon, including in particular sigmatic plural varieties of Sardinian, Friulian, Ladin (Manzini and Savoia 2005, Rasom 2006, 2008, Savoia et al. 2017, 2018b). Analogous partial distributions are found in Lombard varieties with -n feminine plural (Manzini and Savoia 2005, 2007, 2018b) and with -i plurals, including the -i-a feminine plural formations of Lunigiana (Manzini and Savoia 2005, Cavirani 2018). Formal accounts for these phenomena have been provided within Distributed Morphology (Costa and Figuereido Silva 2002), within Optimality Theory (Bonet et al 2015) and within cartographic syntax (Rasom 2006, 2008). These accounts are also limited by the fact that they require two separate rules of agreement, namely Agree in the sense of Chomsky (2001) and Concord – and eventually two different components for their application, roughly core syntax and a DM or OT morpho(phono)logical component. More importantly, they are limited by the fact that they typically consider a single (type of) language and they do not naturally extend to cover known variation. We propose that far from manifesting differences between different agreement processes – or between morphology and syntax – partial distributions of plural inflections simply reflect phasal structure in the DP interacting with externalization. Several issues arise, which will be briefly mentioned, though they cannot be dealt with in any detail in the present contribution.