Apocope and word-final consonants in Italo-Romance

Abstract While Standard Italian only displays word-final consonants in loanwords and some function words, Italo-Romance varieties show a wide range of variation in which major classes of consonants can be found in this position. This survey provides a first overview and finds that the northern varieties and the southern varieties are two different systems, the north gravitating to sonorants and the south showing a preference for obstruents. In the vast majority of cases, unattested consonant classes are excluded by non-application of apocope, which, in Optimality Theory, can only be accounted for with positional markedness or licensing, not with positional faithfulness. The typological relationship between different sets of final consonants as well as types of final clusters shows, furthermore, that an account of the southern system in terms of final onsets is undesirable.