How (Non-)canonical Is Italian Morphology?

This paper gives an overview of the inflectional morphology of Italian adopting the point of view of canonical typology. Most of the material is relatively well-known (although new analyses are proposed for certain verb forms in § 3.3.1, and new interpretations for other phenomena are discussed in §§ 3.3.2 and 4.2.3). What is at least partly original is the perspective adopted: looking at well-known phenomena from a well-described language with the aim of assessing their degree of canonicity. Another contribution of the paper lies in an attempt to apply mathematical measures to assess the canonicity of certain phenomena. Last but not least, this is a piece of Corbettian philology, in that it draws attention to how each phenomenon is defined in Corbett’s work, and to how certain definitions have changed in diachrony (the canonical approach to the description of inflection has been adopted by Corbett since 2005, and major refinements have been proposed in Corbett 2015). The paper is organized as follows: after a presentation of Corbett’s view of canonical inflection in § 1.2, §2 gives an overview of Italian inflection; §3 describes deviations across the cells of single lexemes (alternations and suppletion; syncretism and uninflectability; fused exponence; periphrasis; featural inconsistency); §4 describes deviations across lexemes (homonymy; inflectional classes, heteroclisis and deponency; a possible case of antiperiphrasis; defectiveness); this section concludes by discussing possible alternative analyses of certain adjectival paradigms, that can be seen either as cases of syncretism or as cases of featural inconsistency. §5 offers some concluding remarks.