https://revistes.uab.cat/isogloss <p><em>Isogloss</em> is a journal of theoretical and experimental linguistics, with the Romance varieties as object of investigation.</p><p>Submissions are accepted for articles on any linguistic phenomenon in any Romance variety. No specific theoretical approaches are given any preference, but the articles need to have clear implications for the theory of language and should not be only descriptive in nature.</p> Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona en-US Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics 2385-4138 Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:<br /><ol type="a"><li>Authors retain copyright.</li><li>The texts published in this journal are – unless indicated otherwise – covered by the Creative Commons Spain <a title="Creative Commons" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/deed.en" target="_blank">Attribution 4.0</a> licence. You may copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the work, provided you attribute it (authorship, journal name, publisher) in the manner specified by the author(s) or licensor(s). The full text of the licence can be consulted here: <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</a>.</li><li>Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.</li><li>Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See <a href="http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html" target="_new">The Effect of Open Access</a>).</li></ol> https://revistes.uab.cat/isogloss/article/view/v9-n1-lampitelli-ulfsbjorninn <div class="page" title="Page 1"> <div class="layoutArea"> <div class="column"> <p>The decompositional, non-lexicalist, approach to word-structure and the theory of roots have proven highly rewarding. One grey area, however, comes from Romance since, rather than roots, the word structure primitive appears to be the stem: root + ‘stem-formative/theme vowel’. Regardless, there have been perspicacious decompositional accounts of Italian, however these are still marred by the large number of morphological/item-specific irregularities, motivating arbitrary noun classes. Additionally, there are roots that do not inflect: consonant-final and vowel-final forms when these are oxytonic or loanwords. Given these irregularities, previous analyses in Italian have included the use of lexical exceptions and class features. We challenge the use of class features in generating the attested patterns (and their exceptions). Instead, we propose a new categorisation of root-shapes, which, when combined with the exponents of nominal inflection, produce the correct surface pairings, as well as the non-alternating forms. In our analysis, there is no diacritic or special marking of lexical exceptions, all forms inflect regularly in accordance to their phonological shape. This requires the innovation of one new mechanism (Inhibition), but we back it up by showing that it leads to an unexpected beneficial prediction that solves a long-standing problem associated with <em>Raddoppiamento Sintattico</em> (RS).</p> </div> </div> </div> Nicola Lampitelli Shanti Ulfsbjorninn Copyright (c) 2023 Nicola Lampitelli, Shanti Ulfsbjorninn https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 2023-02-06 2023-02-06 9 1 1 36 10.5565/rev/isogloss.242 https://revistes.uab.cat/isogloss/article/view/v9-n1-sala-et-al <p>Object relatives are more difficult to process than subject relatives. Several sentence processing models have been proposed to explain this difference. As double-center embedding relatives contain several long-distance dependencies, they are an ideal configuration to compare sentence processing models. The main aim of the present study was to compare the predictions of the featural Relativized Minimality approach with the ones of other relevant sentence processing models.</p> <p>57 Italian-speaking healthy adults answered comprehension questions concerning the first, second, or third verb to appear in both double-center embedding and control sentences. Results show that questions concerning the matrix verb of double-center embedding structures were significantly easier and were associated with faster response times than questions concerning the embedded verbs. Furthermore, in object double-center embedding relatives the questions concerning the verb of the most embedded clause were easier than the ones concerning the verb of the intermediate embedded clause.</p> <p>This pattern of results is consistent with featural Relativized Minimality but cannot be fully explained by other sentence processing models.<br /><br /></p> Marco Sala Giulia Bettelli Beatrice Giustolisi Alessandra Vergallito Leonor Josefina Romero Lauro Carlo Cecchetto Copyright (c) 2023 Marco Sala, Giulia Bettelli, Beatrice Giustolisi, Alessandra Vergallito, Leonor Josefina Romero Lauro, Carlo Cecchetto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 2023-01-24 2023-01-24 9 1 1 29 10.5565/rev/isogloss.276