Metaphony as Magnetism

Abstract

Metaphony in Romance poses a well-known problem for Element Theory, as it seems to involve lowering. [D’Alessandro and van Oostendorp (2016)] propose to solve this by assuming some suffixes are ‘ |A| Eaters’, absorbing the |A| element from the stem vowel without getting phonetically realized themselves. This paper points to some problems with this analysis, and shows that Magnetic Grammar, a framework in which all linguistic variation is encoded in features, might help to solve them.