Morris Halle: Latin verbal inflections

[Martha McGinnis]

Morris Halle (halle at mit.edu) writes:

I would be pleased to participate in a correspondence on DM.  At this
moment David Embick and I are working on a paper on the Latin verbal
inflections. We have discovered a number of interesting things:

1)  The basic morphological structure of the word is

	Main Verb -- ASP -- TENSE -- MOOD -- Agr -- VOICE,

with the special provision that the nodes in caps are filled by unary
features, which have the property of collapsing the node when not
present.  Thus, we have all but the VOICE node realized phonetically
in the Pluperfect Subjunctive: lauda: - ui - s - se: - mus, but none
of them appears in the Present Indicative: lauda:-mus.  There all
kinds of interesting further consequences from this fact.

2)  Latin is subject to rhotacism, i.e., to a rule that turn /s/ into
/r/ in intervocalic position.

3)  The /i/ that appears in third conjugation verbs such as

	ducere -- ducimus

is underlyingly different from the /i/ that appears in

	capere -- capimus.

The latter is [-back], but the former is [+back].  Latin is also
subject to a rule that deletes a vowel if followed by a [+back] vowel
-- it is this rule that explains why we have

	/laud-o:/ << /lauda:-o:/,  but
	/mone:-o/ << /mone:-o:/ or
	/audi:-o:/ << /audi:-o:/.

Thus, by positing that the /i/ in /duci-mus/ is [+back] we also
explain why we get

	/duk-o:/ << /duk-i[+back] - o:/, but
	/capi-o:/ << /cap-i[-back]-o:/.

It turns out that the Latin grammarians (Quintillian et al) noted
that there are two /i/s in their language.

So here you have a short report on what I am doing in morphology.