| Romance Plurals |
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| indo-european linguistics | |
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The ( Vulgar Latin ) Accusative case, while east and south of it, the plurals were usually formed from the Nominative case. Eastern Romance plurals and Western Romance plurals are underlyingly similar to their Western Romance equivalents: they are built from an unmarked (singular) stem and a plural Morpheme . Throughout history, this morpheme has fundamentally preserved its formal shape: the Romance plural corresponds to the morphophonological feature /coronal/. This feature is realized both in the vocalic alternations of eastern Romance plurals, and in the consonantal {Link without Title} plurals of western Romance. The Latin and [s endings, singulars and plurals would have become homophonic and Nominative plurals provided an escape-hatch to formally restore the distinction in number. The Accusative view is strictly phonological and argues that the loss of final {Link without Title} induced the vocalic alternations. The Vocalic Changes that take place in Italian or Romanian Plural formation are the result of spreading a subset of features of the Latin accusative plural marker {Link without Title} . This analysis allows for a uniform approach to all Romance languages and hence reduces the differences between the examples in (1) and (2) to surface effects: just like the Romance languages in the west, eastern Romance languages form their plural through morphological augmentation. Romance languages encode plural markings on nouns and adjectives through: # an affix: ## Portuguese cavalo cavalos ## Spanish caballo caballos ## Catalan cavall cavalls ## Provençal chaval chavals ## Franco-provençal chavau chavaus ## French cheval chevaux ## Sardinian ca(bà)dhu ca(bà)dhos # vocalic alternation: ## Italian cavallo cavalli ## Romanian cal cai RULE OF PLURAL FORMATION Rule of plural formation ( Italian , Romanian ): NPl. = Nstem + ‘‘residual s’’ :a Italian amico amici ‘friend(s)’ : [amiʧi :b Romanian bunic bunici ‘grandfather(s)’ : [buniʧʲ Palatalization effects like above and other consonantal changes induced by surrounding Vowels have lead to the insight that vowels and consonants share the same set of (primary) place (or articulator) features. :a In eastern Romance, final {Link without Title} survived in some instances through spreading of its coronal feature :b In Italian and Romanian plurals are formed through morphological augmentation REFERENCES
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