Apocope and word-final consonants in Italo-Romance

Bibliographic Data

ID21583403
AuthorsMartin Kramer (0000-0002-2560-2679, Department of Language and Culture , UiT The Arctic University of Tromsø , Hansine Hansens Veg 18, 9019 , Tromsø , Norway, corresponding author)
Year2026
Publication date2026-01-20
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueProbus (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0921-4771 • E-ISSN: 1613-4079
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/probus-2025-0012
OpenAlexW7124740921
LanguageEN
References cited19

While Standard Italian only displays word-final consonants in loanwords and some function words, Italo-Romance varieties show a wide range of variation in which major classes of consonants can be found in this position. This survey provides a first overview and finds that the northern varieties and the southern varieties are two different systems, the north gravitating to sonorants and the south showing a preference for obstruents. In the vast majority of cases, unattested consonant classes are excluded by non-application of apocope, which, in Optimality Theory, can only be accounted for with positional markedness or licensing, not with positional faithfulness. The typological relationship between different sets of final consonants as well as types of final clusters shows, furthermore, that an account of the southern system in terms of final onsets is undesirable

Consonant · Markedness · Phonological rule · Preference · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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