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Part of
Structuring Variation in Romance Linguistics and Beyond: In honour of Leonardo M. Savoia
Edited by Mirko Grimaldi, Rosangela Lai, Ludovico Franco and Benedetta Baldi
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 252] 2018
► pp. 297–306

Chapter 20
Metaphony as magnetism

| Meertens Instituut and Radboud University
| Utrecht University

Metaphony in Romance poses a well-known problem for Element Theory, as it seems to involve lowering. [D’Alessandro and van Oostendorp (2016)] propose to solve this by assuming some suffixes are ‘ |A| Eaters’, absorbing the |A| element from the stem vowel without getting phonetically realized themselves. This paper points to some problems with this analysis, and shows that Magnetic Grammar, a framework in which all linguistic variation is encoded in features, might help to solve them.

Keywords: Element Theory, phonology, primitives, Magnetic Grammar
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Metaphony and the |A| eater
  • 3.Magnetic grammar
  • 4.Metaphony in magnetic grammar
  • 5.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 19 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.252.20oos
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