Beyond Aspect. Past participles in Italo-Romance: a Distributed Morphology perspective

This thesis investigates the morphological behavior of past participles in Italian and the Italo-Romance varieties, focusing on their remarkable internal variation. Past participles occupy an intermediate space between the verbal and nominal domains, and in Romance, they exhibit wide-ranging morphological alternations and syntactic versatility. The aim of the study is to provide a theoretical account of both canonical and non-canonical past participle forms within the Italo- Romance domain. The first goal is descriptive: to classify and map the diversity of past participle forms, including arrhizotonic thematic, rhizotonic athematic, /-sto/ type and non-canonical types. The second goal is formal: to analyze this variation within the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM). After reviewing existing accounts of participial morphology in Latin and Romance, the thesis highlights their limitations when extended to Italo-Romance dialects. In response, a unified model is proposed, one that posits the presence of two aspectual projections (Asp° and n°/Asp) to reflect the hybrid nature of the participle as both a verbal and nominal/adjectival element. The model captures the distribution of the exponents /-s-/ and /-t-/, accounts for non-canonical forms, interprets stem allomorphy and offers insights for a better understanding of both thematic vowel behavior and dialectal variation.