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The access to the contents of this doctoral thesis it is limited to the acceptance of the use conditions set by the following Creative Commons license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/?lang=en The Influence of Phonology on Inflection The interplay between syllabification and lexical insertion in Pallarese Catalan Eduard Art´es Cuenca PhD Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Eul`alia Bonet Alsina Departament de Filologia Catalana Universitat Aut`onoma de Barcelona PhD Program in Cognitive Science and Language Barcelona, June 2016 2 A la meva mare Gender is a complexity whose totality is permanently deferred, never fully what it is at any given juncture in time. Gender Trouble Judith Butler 3 4 ABSTRACT This dissertation deals with the constraints that phonology imposes on the expo- nence of gender. In particular, it explores the interaction between epenthesis and nominal inflection in Pallarese Catalan clitics. Since inflection is located word-finally in Pallarese, I argue that right-edge epenthesis is avoided in order to maintain a strict correspondence between morphological and phonological structure. Inflectional vow- els may be used for syllabification purposes in word-final position instead. It is assumed in this thesis that every syntactic functional head projects a post- syntactic theme position (Oltra-Massuet, 1999) where gender is realized. A key aspect of the proposal is the idea that the exponents of gender are floating features, and thus inflection proceeds in two steps. First, the theme position is spelled out with an underspecified vowel (i.e., Th V) and, subsequently, the floating features ↔ associated with gender ([+fem] [+low], i.e., -[a]; [–fem] [+labial,–high], i.e., ↔ ↔ -[o]) are attached to the V-slot of the theme position. Couched within Optimality Theory, I argue that the constraint ranking determines whether the featural gender exponents surface or not. The feminine is always realized due to a constraint that favors parsing [+low] (which implies adding association lines that are absent in the input), whereas in the masculine the insertion of new association lines in the output is dispreferred and the features associated with [–fem] are not parsed, which accounts for default masculine -[Ø] exponence. If gender is part of the morphosyntatic com- position of a clitic, as in the 3rd person singular masculine accusative clitic, these floating features can nevertheless be attached to the V-slot of the theme position to improve syllabic structure under certain phonotactic conditions. This ‘morphologi- cal solution’ is less costly than (regular) word-initial epenthesis because it does not need to create a new skeletal position or insert new features. Impoverishment (Bonet, 1991) deletes gender features in the 3rd person plural accusative clitic, and thus the corresponding phonological features associated with gender cannot be used for syllabification purposes. The theme position with the 5 V-slot is maintained, though, and the default epenthetic features of Pallarese are inserted when required by phonotactics, which forces a thematic interpretation of this vowel. This solution is preferred over word-initial epenthesis because the theme position already provides a skeletal slot. The same procedure applies to other clitics that do not bear gender features either. Even though Pallarese shows a complex morphophonological intertwining regard- ing gender exponence, the OT analysis presented in this dissertation makes exclusive reference to phonological objects. The morphosyntactic structure of the nominal sys- tem constrains epenthesis, but strict modularity can be maintained. Furthermore, the use of floating features in the input can dispense with gender allomorphy (cf. Bonet et al. 2007). As for nouns and adjectives, the general process that spells out an underspecified vowel in the theme position, on the one hand, and floating place features for gender values, on the other, is only valid for default endings. That is, vowels other than -a (feminine) and -o (masculine) —when it surfaces— cannot be considered gender markers and need to be fully specified in the theme position of lexical entries instead. Therefore, nouns with non-regular endings are stored as complex representations and phonologically realized in one single step. This supports theories that assume that one exponent (or set of exponents) can spell out whole morphosyntactic structures (e.g., Siddiqi 2009, Caha 2009 or Berm´udez-Otero 2012). 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The time to thank all the people that have helped me in one way or another during this long journey has (finally!) come. Words cannot express how grateful I am to Eul`alia Bonet. She is the best supervisor one can ask for, and this thesis would not have been possible without her. I want to thank Eul`alia for her patience and availability in reading all the chapters of this thesis and answering all my questions (always with a smile), even the dumbest ones. Besides being an awesome linguist, Eul`alia is a humble person, something I truly appreciate. I am also very grateful to the members of my thesis committee. My heartfelt thanks to Joan Mascar´o(who has always been willing to help during my life as a PhD student at UAB) and Maria Rosa Lloret. I am particularly indebted to “Xico” Torres-Tamarit. Xico always encouraged me to submit abstracts to conferences to overcome my insecurities and, on many occasions, he had more faith in me than I did myself. In the end he was right and I was able to finish this thesis! I would like to thank all the people at the Centre de Ling¨u´ıstica Te`orica, where I felt at home during the four years of my grant, especially Mar Massanell (for her support with the fieldwork) and Teresa Cabr´eand Maria Ohannesian (both members of the Phonology Reading Group). I could not have survived the PhD without the countless coffee and lunch breaks at UAB with my colleagues: Teresa Blasco, Isabel Castro, Ekaterina Chernova, Adri- ana Fasanella, Javi Fern´andez, Jordi Fortuny, El´ıas Gallardo, Luc´ıaMedea Garc´ıa, Yurena Guti´errez, Maya Leela, Ares Llop (who also gave me the topic for this dissert- tion!), Cristina Real, Marina Roman, Carlos Rubio, Io Salmons and Qiuyue Zhong. I really miss my UAB life and the great moments we all spent together. I spent the Fall semester 2013 at the incredible MIT Department of Linguistics. I want to offer my thanks to Donca Steriade, who welcomed me into the department and transmitted her passion for phonology to me, and to Maria Luisa Freitas and Elena Nulvesu, for making a new place feel more familiar. 7 I also had a short stay at the University of Manchester in fall 2014. Yuni Kim always finds the time to help students —even when she does not have it— and I want to thank her for reading parts of this dissertation. I owe my deepest gratitude to Ricardo Berm´udez-Otero, as some of the theoretical assumptions of this thesis are based on our discussions. I really admire Ricardo’s capacity to find empirical evidence to support his theory in apparently unconnected phenomena. I have great memories of Manchester due to the people I shared my life with in those four months: Laura Arman, Fernanda Barrientos, James W. R. Brookes, Carlos Ivanhoe Gil Burgoin and Danielle Turton. Many thanks to Danielle Turton for last minute (almost literally) proofreading. Laura Arman has been my LaTeX Guardian Angel these last two years and also accepted proofreading the thesis at the very last moment. She is a great person and I cannot thank her enough for everything she has done for me. I am deeply thankful to the Consell Cultural de les Valls d’Aneu` (in particular, to Ferran Rella and Laura Grimau), the Ecomuseu de les Valls d’Aneu` , the town hall of Alins (Vall Ferrera), the Hotel Castellarnau (Escal´o), Marta Lluvich and N´uria Garcia Quera for helping me find participants for the study of Pallarese Catalan clitics. Special thanks should be given to the participants in the interviews held in May 2014 in Vall d’Aneu` and Vall Ferrera, from whom I learnt not only about language but also about rural anthropology. I would also like to thank Gus Mendia for the cover design. Finally, special thanks to Xavi, who has been very patient in this long process (especially these last two months), and my sister, because it is easier to feel lost in life by her side. Li dedico aquesta tesi a la meva mare, que sempre ens ha animat a estudiar. Arribar fins aqu´ıha valgut la pena per ella. 8 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 5 Acknowledgments 7 1 Introduction 12 1.1 Thephonology-morphologyinterface . 12 1.1.1 Morphology and the lexicon . 12 1.1.2 TheoriesofInflection . .. .. 16 1.1.3 Morphology,phonologyorboth?. 22 1.2 Outlineofthethesis ........................... 28 2 The Pallarese Catalan clitic system 30 2.1 GeneralDescription............................ 30 2.1.1 Socio-GeographicInformation . 30 2.1.2 Methodology ........................... 31 2.1.3 Morphophonological description . 34 2.1.3.1 Combinations . 39 2.1.4 Syncretism in Pallarese Clitics . 42 2.2 Phonological Conditionings on Clitics’ Surface Forms . 44 2.2.1 Clitics in Isolation . 44 2.2.2 Clitic Clusters . 52 2.3 TheDefiniteArticle............................ 61 3 Nominal Inflection in Catalan and Spanish 64 3.1 Gender................................... 64 3.1.1 Catalan .............................. 65 3.1.1.1 Wheeler(1979) ..................... 67 3.1.1.2 Mascar´o(1985)and Mascar´o(1986) .