Ɛ- vs a- Alternation in the Auxiliary and Distribution of OCls in Calabro-Lucanian Dialects of Lausberg Area

This article deals with the realization of 3rd person object clitics in auxiliary contexts in some Southern-Italian dialects spoken in the “Lausberg area”, where the allomorphy ɛ-/a- in the auxiliary stem and enclisis are involved. We investigate this phenomenon in relation to the overall distribution of OCls. The core question is the theoretical status of morphology. Although morphology is nothing more than a way of expressing syntactic structures, it is traditionally seen as a post-syntactic component, that, according to DM, conveys information “separated from the original locus of that information in the phrase marker” (Embick and Noyer 2001, 557) by means of rules manipulating syntactic nodes. We pursue a different approach whereby morphology is governed by the same computational rules of syntax and subword elements are fully interpretable. Inflection and clitics are the result of (pair-)merge operations (Chomsky 2020a, b), giving rise to amalgams based on the agreement in φ-features.