An Exploration of Truncation in Italian

Italian displays a rich variety of truncation patterns and therefore forms an ideal testing ground for constraint interaction determining truncation in general. This paper describes in detail the various truncation patterns of Italian: monosyllabic light syllable templates, bisyllabic templates and atemplatic patterns, both initially and stress anchored. Based on joint work with Sabine Arndt-Lappe, a set of anchoring and size restrictor constraints is proposed, which determine the typology of Italian truncation patterns and avoid generating systems which are not attested among the world's languages. Specifically, it is proposed that two Anchor constraints (Anchor-L and Anchor-R), defined as alignment constraints, are responsible for edge anchoring in truncation as well as for maximality effects. Anchor-stress, defined as a faithfulness constraint, is reponsible for stress anchoring. The size-restrictor constraint Coincide-s1 guarantees that monosyllabic templates emerge and, through its gradient evaluation, allows the generation of atemplatic truncation patterns. This set of constraint allows to preserve the architecture of Generalized Template Theory, where templates emerge as unmarked structures, but at the same time avoids unwanted predictions of other constraint sets proposed in the literature for truncation or reduplication.