Abstract
In this paper I reconsider the synchronic status of distinctive vowel length and vowel lengthening and shortening rules in Northern Romance varieties, in light of Loporcaro’s (2015) wide-ranging study of vowel quantity in numerous Romance dialects. Loporcaro (2015) argues that these varieties possess distinctive, phonemic vowel length, and mostly do not have synchronic rules that produce surface long vowels, contrary to many previous analyses of the relevant patterns. In this paper, I argue instead that that lexical vowel length distinctions coexist, in some Northern Romance varieties, with productive phonological rules manipulating vowel quantity. This co- existence is best understood with recourse to the life cycle of phonological processes, and in particular the notion of rule scattering (Bermudez-Otero 2015). This approach not only allows us to reach an adequate interpretation of the basic facts but also makes further predictions regarding the status of quantity-manipulating rules, which also turn out to be correct, providing further support for the theory of the life cycle.
Highlights
In this paper I reconsider the synchronic status of distinctive vowel length and vowel lengthening and shortening rules in Northern Romance varieties, in light of Loporcaro’s (2015) wide-ranging study of vowel quantity in numerous Romance dialects
Vowel length in Northern Romance has attracted signi icant amounts of theoretical attention from phonologists working in the generative tradition
It can be argued that Loporcaro’s (2015) rejection of any rôle for phonological computation in establishing the observed distribution of vowel length in Northern Romance goes too far in the other direction. He is surely right that in many varieties and for many lexical items the Late Latin sound change of open syllable lengthening has resulted in the establishment of a vowel length distinction in underlying representation that is faithfully reproduced in surface forms
Summary
In a meticulous and wide-ranging study covering effectively the entire temporal and spatial span of Latin and its Romance descendants, Loporcaro (2015) argues in great detail that the distribution and functioning of phonological vowel length in these varieties is best understood with reference to a sound change of open syllable lengthening in the Late Latin period. Loporcaro (2015) argues that these analyses are wide of the mark because distinctive vowel length has entered the underlying representation of the relevant morphemes That such distinctive vowel length is required is con irmed by the existence of minimal pairs such as those in (1), where the following consonants are not obstruents. [T]hat Friulian [vowel length] derives from [open syllable lengthening] automatically implies that this is a diachronic change which effected, centuries ago, a restructuring in the underlying form (as no open syllable is there, synchronically, in, say, [ˈlat] ‘gone’) He dismisses attempts to account for alternations such as those in (2) via synchronic phonological computation as similar to the kind of phonological overreach that postulated an underlying /ix/ to account for the lack of trisyllabic shortening in English nightingale.
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