Uninflectability in Italian nouns and adjectives

This chapter illustrates the factors that render Italian nouns and adjectives uninflectable. Three phonological factors – ending in a stressed vowel, in a consonant or in /i/ in the citation form – are causes of uninflectability for both nouns and adjectives; while ending in a stressed vowel results in exceptionless uninflectability at all times, nouns and adjectives ending in a consonant were phonologically adapted by providing them with a final vowel, and subsequently integrated in an inflecting class, in older stages of the Italian language, but at present this does not happen anymore; a few nouns and adjectives ending in /i/ have occasionally developed an inflecting variant through backformation, when the form ending in /i/ has been interpreted as an inflected masculine plural form. Another factor that produces uninflectability of nouns is a mismatch between a noun's final vowel and its gender: neological masculine nouns in /a/ and feminine nouns in /o/, whose final vowels are typical of nouns bearing the opposite gender value, are treated as uninflectable in contemporary Italian. Even recently borrowed or recently coined nouns ending in the vowels most typical for their gender can be uninflectable; this is more common for nouns denoting inanimate entities, and for nouns bearing foreign characteristics in their spelling. There are also cases of constructional uninflectability, two of which are briefly discussed. The chapter also illustrates the inflectional classes of Italian nouns and adjectives and provides quantitative data about types and tokens in each inflectional class from several available databases.