ITALIAN ONSET STRUCTURE AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF IL AND LO

In Italian there are two forms of the masculine definite article: il and lo. Their distribution appears quite anomalous. The form il occurs before nouns and adjectives that begin with a single consonant; it also occurs before nouns and adjectives that begin with a specific set of consonant clusters. The article lo occurs before nouns and adjectives that begin with a vowel or glide; additionally, it occurs before nouns or adjectives that begin with a different set of consonant clusters. This paper addresses the question whether or not there is any way of characterizing the group of sounds that il can precede and the group of sounds that lo can precede. It is shown that by adopting the syllable-formation rules proposed in Steriade (1982) and a language- specific sonority (or strength) hierarchy for Italian, the distribution of il and lo can be accounted for by the following generalization: il occurs before nouns and adjectives that begin with a consonant which is syllabified as part of the syllable onset, while lo occurs before nouns and adjectives that do not begin with such. © 1990, Walter de Gruyter.