Allomorphy in pre-clitic imperatives in Formenteran Catalan

In some Romance languages second person singular imperatives often surface with an added extension, an accretion, when they are followed by enclitics. This paper examines this phenomenon in Formenteran Catalan, where the accretion has different shapes depending on the verb. We argue that the appearance of the accretion is caused by a phonological constraint requiring a right-aligned moraic trochee. The form of the imperative with the accretion coincides with the inflectional stem that is found in other forms of the imperative paradigm. We propose an output-based analysis in which Lexical Conservatism (Steriade 1999, 2008) and Uniform Exponence (Kenstowicz 1996, 1997, 2005) play a key role.

Published online: 25 November 2010
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.315.20bon