Romance Monosyllabic Imperatives and Markedness

Franck Floricic (1) , Lucia Molinu (2)

1 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018
2 BCL, équipe Diachronie, Dialectologie, et Phonologie (DDP) [2008..2015]

The aim of this paper is to account for the particular shape of some Romance imperatives. It has long been recognized that imperatives often equal the bare stem and their morphological make-up reflects their primitive status in language acquisition. It will be shown that in Romance some imperatives can even go farther in phonetic reduction: the verb stem can be radically amputated and the possible reasons for such a drastic reduction will be discussed. It will be argued that phonological submini-mality arises even in those languages in which minimal size restrictions have been taken to be at work. The question of frequency will be addressed, and the view will be held that subminimality produces phonologically marked structures which cannot be accounted for by resorting to frequency effects: though frequency appears to be relevant, it will be argued that monosyllabic imperatives are structurally marked and that markedness stems from the speech-rooted nature of imperatives.

Mots clés: Imperatives; Monosyllabic; Markedness; frequency; phonetic reduction; Minimality

Domaines: Linguistique

Franck Floricic, Lucia Molinu. Romance Monosyllabic Imperatives and Markedness. Thomas Stolz, Nicole Nau, Cornelia Stroh. Monosyllables: from phonology to typology, Akademie Verlag, pp.149-172, 2012, STUF Studia Typologica. ⟨halshs-00756954⟩