The nature of phonological conditioning in Latin inflectional allomorphy

Abstract

This paper offers a comprehensive analysis of the inflectional morphology of Latin in terms of the patterns of allomorphy and the environments governing the distribution of allomorphs. It is demonstrated that all the attested allomorphic alternations can be described as functions of a vocalic scale, practically the sonority scale of vowels plus the undifferentiated class of consonants as the least sonorous extreme. The distribution of allomorphs along the vocalic scale crucially displays the property of contiguity, i.e., the subsections of the scale that trigger one particular allomorph are uninterrupted.