A Classless Analysis of Italian Nouns and their Theme-Vowel Alternations

The decompositional, non-lexicalist, approach to word-structure and the theory of roots have proven highly rewarding. One grey area, however, comes from Romance since, rather than roots, word structure primitive appears be stem: root + ‘stem-formative/theme vowel’. Regardless, there been perspicacious decompositional accounts Italian, however these are still marred by large number morphological/item-specific irregularities, motivating arbitrary noun classes. Additionally, that do not inflect: consonant-final vowel-final forms when oxytonic or loanwords. Given previous analyses in Italian included use lexical exceptions class features. We challenge features generating attested patterns (and their exceptions). Instead, we propose a new categorisation root-shapes, which, combined with exponents nominal inflection, produce correct surface pairings, as well non-alternating forms. In our analysis, is no diacritic special marking exceptions, all inflect regularly accordance phonological shape. This requires innovation one mechanism (Inhibition), but back it up showing leads an unexpected beneficial prediction solves long-standing problem associated Raddoppiamento Sintattico (RS).