Progressive metaphony in the Abruzzese dialect of Teramo

Résumé En

This contribution deals with metaphony, an assimilatory process that has targeted stressed vowels in the evolution from Latin to Romance, particularly widespread in Italo-Romance. First, progressive metaphony is tackled, an understudied type of metaphony that concerns only restricted areas of the Italian peninsula located in the Abruzzi and Molise. A description of the process and a reconstruction of the vowel-system of the dialect that best instantiates this phenomenon are provided, followed by a formal account. Both feature-based and element-based analyses are presented, discussed and compared. Then, the inferences from the analysis of progressive metaphony are tested on data concerning regressive metaphony. Finally, the hints gathered from these analyses are exploited to advance an alternative, tentative proposal on the general workings of the metaphonic process, where the element A and the notion of head have a key role. This proposition helps answering some questions that are left open when metaphony is looked at through the usual perspective, and suggests some new paths of research.