L'alternance des voyelles moyennes en coratin : une analyse basée sur la théorie des éléments

Coratino is a dialect spoken in the region of Puglia, in which there is a process of vowel reduction: all unstressed vowels except /a/are reduced to schwa. However, this reduction does not happen when a vowel is adjacent to a consonant that shares a melody element, such as palatality for front vowels and velarity or labiality for back vowels. In addition, the ATR property of the mid vowels alternates: stressed /epsilon,(sic)/ are realized as [e, o] in unstressed positions, and /o,(sic)/ surface as [u] only when the adjacent consonant is velar. The analysis of this alternation is based on a version of Element Theory, and also on the licensing constraints that on the one hand define the specific choice a language makes among the combinatory possibilities, and on the other hand play a role in defining the properties of the phonological processes in the language.