{"id":2517,"date":"2026-04-08T09:52:55","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T13:52:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=2517"},"modified":"2026-04-23T17:27:43","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T21:27:43","slug":"italian-palatalization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/italian-palatalization\/","title":{"rendered":"Italian palatalization"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his <\/span>Phonology of Italian,<\/em>\u00a0Kr\u00e4mer (2009:<\/span>\u00a7<\/span>4.2.1) is interested in the productivity of velar palatlization before \/i\/-initial suffixes, such as the masculine noun plural \/-i\/. Palatalization obtains in, for example, in <\/span>amico-amici<\/em> [a\u02c8mi\u02d0ko, a\u02c8mi\u02d0t\u0283i] \u2018friend(s)\u2019, but not in <\/span>cuoco-cuochi <\/em>[\u02c8kw\u0254\u02d0ko, \u02c8kw\u0254\u02d0ki] `cook(s)\u2019<\/span>. Kr\u00e4mer (henceforth K) further claims that non-palatalization has much higher type frequency. <\/span><\/p>\n

K performs a small experiment in which ten adult native speakers are presented with nonce words in the singular and asked to complete sentence which requires them to form the \/-i\/ plural. Four subjects never palatalized; one palatalized all plurals; and five others produced a mix of the two strategies. Summarizing this result, <\/span>Kr\u00e4mer (2012:125)<\/span> concludes: \u201cThus, in Italian it is a personal decision whether velar palatalization is productive or not.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

I am not sure I agree. The most straightforward interpretation of this data, I think, is that the subjects used a mix of different task models. Some subjects may have been reasoning on whether palatalization is actually productive (a true \u201cgrammatical task model\u201d), which for me means that the generalization is encoded (or not encoded, as seems more likely here) so as to apply to arbitrary words. Others may have been guessing based on form similarity to existing words (a \u201cdictionary task model\u201d), and others may have used a mix of the two strategies. It is perhaps not surprising that that adults can make use of the dictionary task model, because one can, with some conscious effort, think of phonemically or semantically related real words, and it\u2019s easy to imagine deciding on whether or not to palatalize a nonce word based on the behavior of similar real words. <\/span><\/p>\n

I think, unfortunately, that this is an unavoidable problem when <\/span>wug<\/em>-testing adults. I submit that the conscious analogizing abilities of adults are probably not relevant to questions of productivity and I think that because I don\u2019t think that\u2019s what productivity <\/span>is<\/span>. But I don\u2019t know of any way to prevent adult participants from using a dictionary task model. <\/span>Thus linguists and reviewers should be more skeptical about the utility of adult wug<\/em>-tasks.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sch\u00fctze (2005) makes a similar point with what we might call <\/span>wug<\/em>–<\/span>rating tasks. In such tasks, speakers are asked to assign a wellformedness rating (e.g., on a Likert scale) to candidate inflected forms of nonce words. Arguably, this setting encourage speakers to adopt a highly permissive variant of the dictionary task model, which might be framed as asking \u201ccould such a word ever have such a plural?\u201d An answer to such questions are often interesting to the linguist, but I think it quite distinct from the question of productivity that K and others wish to study. <\/span><\/p>\n

References <\/span><\/h1>\n

Kr\u00e4mer, M. 2009. <\/span>The Phonology of Italian<\/em>. Oxford University Press.
\n<\/span>Kr\u00e4mer, M. 2012. <\/span>Underlying Representations<\/em>. Cambridge University Press.
\n<\/span>Sch\u00fctze, C. 2005. Thinking about what we are asking speakers to do. In Kepser, S. and Reis, M. (ed.), <\/span>Linguistic Evidence: Empirical, Theoretical, and Computational Perspectives<\/em>, pages 457-485. De Gruyter Mouton.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his Phonology of Italian,\u00a0Kr\u00e4mer (2009:\u00a74.2.1) is interested in the productivity of velar palatlization before \/i\/-initial suffixes, such as the masculine noun plural \/-i\/. Palatalization obtains in, for example, in amico-amici [a\u02c8mi\u02d0ko, a\u02c8mi\u02d0t\u0283i] \u2018friend(s)\u2019, but not in cuoco-cuochi [\u02c8kw\u0254\u02d0ko, \u02c8kw\u0254\u02d0ki] `cook(s)\u2019. Kr\u00e4mer (henceforth K) further claims that non-palatalization has much higher type frequency. K performs … Continue reading “Italian palatalization”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[32,4,29,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-exceptionality","category-language","category-paste-tense-debate","category-phonology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2517"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2531,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2517\/revisions\/2531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}