ABSTRACT

This chapter presents an overview of the intersection of three factors: the metaphonic configurations, the inflectional paradigms in which metaphony creates alternation, and the various patterns of subsequent phonetically conditioned merger of inflectional desinences. It seeks particularly to identify and explain apparent deviations from the regularly predictable patterns of alternation. The morphological structures historically underlying the verbal and declensional paradigms of all Italian dialects consisted of a lexical stem and a suffixed inflectional exponent of morphosyntactic category. The inflectional desinence generally contained, or consisted solely of, an unstressed vowel. Posttonic, the conditioning environments for metaphony, figured among the desinences, giving rise to metaphonic alternation within paradigms. In many dialects subsequent merger of posttonic vowels has left metaphonic alternation as the sole indicator of morphosyntactic categories originally expressed by the inflections.