About

Lori Repetti is a Distinguished Service Professor and the Undergraduate Program Director in the Department of Linguistics at Stony Brook University. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1989. Her research focuses on phonology, Romance linguistics, and dialectology. Dr. Repetti's work involves the study of phonological systems, language variation, and the linguistic features of Romance languages, contributing to a deeper understanding of dialectal differences and phonological processes within these language groups.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Linguistics
• Sociology
• Mathematics education
• Mathematics
• Psychology
• Philosophy
• Pedagogy
• Biology

Selected publications

• All about ablaut: a typology of ablaut reduplicative structures

  Linguistic Typology · 2024-05-23 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract In this typological study, we identify 31 languages that have reduplication with a changed vowel, as in English tick-tock , referred to as ablaut reduplication. Cross-linguistically, this type of reduplication typically manifests as total reduplication with a changed vowel whose quality may or may not be fixed, and when it is not fixed the vowel differs maximally from the corresponding vowel in the base. The order of the copy relative to the base can be fixed or variable, and when it is variable the order enforces a language-specific vowel contour across the two components, such as a low vowel in the first constituent and a high vowel in the second, regardless of which constituent is the base. Furthermore, all cases of ablaut have strikingly similar semantics (playfulness, onomatopoeia, movement, etc.). We review previous treatments of the topic and outline the necessary components of a unified analysis that accommodates the typological patterns.

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• Frontmatter

  Probus · 2024-05-01

  articleOpen access
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• ‘Language in the United States’: An innovative learner-centered, asynchronous general-education course in linguistics

  Language · 2023 · 2 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Sociology
  • Artificial Intelligence

  LIN 200 ‘Language in the United States’ is a large general-education course dealing with linguistic diversity in the United States. It is taught online in an asynchronous format and attracts hundreds of students each semester. The pedagogical innovations adopted in this course include the use of guest lectures by leading experts in the field, the design of discussion board activities to facilitate interaction among students and with instructors, and the organization of the material into adaptable learning modules. We adopt a learner-centered approach using the backward-design framework and applying the community-of-inquiry model. The result is a course that succeeds in achieving its main learning goals: to introduce students to the vast linguistic diversity in the United States and to the basic principles of linguistics, in particular, that human language is primarily spoken or signed (not written), that every human group has its own language, and that all languages are equally capable of expressing any human thought or emotion, although their social prestige may differ.

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• Conditioned epenthesis in Romance

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022 · 2 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Artificial Intelligence

  The factors influencing the insertion of non-etymological material (epenthesis) may extend beyond phonetics and phonology to include morphological and morphosyntactic considerations. We analyse cases from a wide variety of Romance languages where more than one epenthetic segment may satisfy a phonological constraint. We show that the choice of segment may be influenced by morphology or morphosyntax. We also investigate the insertion of a meaningless syllable where there may be little or no phonological motivation for insertion, but morphology plays a role in its distribution. In all of the cases examined, the inserted material (segment or syllable) has no semantic value and so is not a morph. Many of these phenomena have been accounted for in terms of lexically listed allomorphs; however, such an approach misses generalizations about the form and presence of the epenthetic material. We conclude that the notion of epenthesis should be broadened to include morphological and morphosyntactic conditions.

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• Italia, Italie. Studi in onore di Hermann W. Haller

  Italica · 2021-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• <b>Advances in Italian dialectology: Sketches of Italo-Romance grammars</b> . Ed. by Roberta D'Alessandro and Diego Pescarini. (Grammars and language sketches of the world's languages: Romance languages.) Leiden: Brill, 2018. Pp. x, 373. ISBN 9789004354388. $138 (Hb).

  Language · 2019-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Advances in Italian dialectology: Sketches of Italo-Romance grammars ed. by Roberta D’Alessandro, Diego Pescarini Lori Repetti* Advances in Italian dialectology: Sketches of Italo-Romance grammars. Ed. by Roberta D’Alessandro and Diego Pescarini. (Grammars and language sketches of the world’s languages: Romance languages.) Leiden: Brill, 2018. Pp. x, 373. ISBN 9789004354388. $138 (Hb). Brill has recently launched a new series—‘Grammars and sketches of the world’s languages’— to disseminate information about understudied languages, with subseries on the languages of South East Asia, Africa, and Russia, as well as Papuan and Romance languages. The last subseries is edited by Roberta D’Alessandro, one of the coeditors of the volume under review. Advances in Italian dialectology: Sketches of Italo-Romance grammars, edited by D’Alessandro and Diego Pescarini, is the fifth volume published in this series since its inception in 2014 and the first in the ‘Romance languages’ subseries. It is appropriate that this particular volume opens the subseries on Romance languages, since the indigenous languages of Italy are perhaps the most understudied of the Romance languages, as well as the most endangered (Moseley 2010, Eberhard et al. 2019). Most Romance varieties spoken in Italy are called ‘dialects’. This is an infelicitous use of the term, since the word dialect is often understood to mean a variety of a language used by a specific group or in a specific area. However, the Italian ‘dialects’ are not varieties of Italian, and therefore are not dialects of Italian. In fact, they do not derive from, nor are they necessarily mutually intelligible with, Italian. Instead, they all derive from Latin, so they are sister languages, although the most prestigious sister, Italian, has certainly exerted a strong influence on the other varieties. The use of the term ‘dialect’ in this review and in this book is intended to mean generically ‘language variety spoken in Italy’. (See Cravens 2014 for the political implications of language classification in Italy.) The introductory chapter offers a brief history of linguistic research on the Romance varieties spoken in Italy and lays out the goal of the book: to provide descriptive sketches of previously unknown or poorly studied phenomena in these languages, without necessarily drawing theoretical conclusions. The volume features work by well-known scholars in the field, as well as up-and-coming scholars, and is divided into four parts, which group chapters based on the area where the variety under investigation is spoken: ‘Northern varieties’, ‘Central varieties’, ‘Upper southern varieties’, ‘Extreme southern varieties and Sardinian’. The chapters cover the core areas of grammar, divided evenly between (morpho)phonology and (morpho)syntax. This is a particularly welcome aspect of this volume, as the field of Romance linguistics in general and Italian dialect studies in particular has become dominated in recent years by work on syntax. I begin this review with a discussion of the (morpho)phonology chapters. Edoardo Cavirani provides a data-rich discussion of number and gender in nominal expressions in Lunigiana, a linguistically complex yet severely understudied area at the border of three typologically different dialect groups: Ligurian, Emilian, and Tuscan. The Lunigiana zone displays a significant amount of microvariation, as illustrated in Cavirani’s discussion of the feminine and plural features of nominal expressions. He identifies three suffixes used to mark feminine plural nouns: -e (identical to standard Italian), -a (syncretic with the feminine singular form), and -ja (analyzed as plural /i/ + feminine /a/). The last form is especially surprising since, according to the mirror principle, we expect the opposite order of morphemes—gender (/a/) >> plural (/i/)—as in other Romance languages such as Spanish (e.g. lob-oM-sPL ‘wolves’). However, Cavirani argues that this is only an apparent violation of the mirror principle due to licensing restrictions analyzed within the framework of element theory (Backley 2011). A detailed survey of the distribution of feminine plural markers on different elements in the DP (nouns, articles, adjectives, [End Page 371] demonstratives, etc.) rounds off the discussion. Cavirani generously offers a trove of data to illustrate the rich microvariation attested in this complex zone. Gender and number agreement is also the topic of Michele...

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• 4. Fieldwork and building corpora for endangered varieties

  2018-06-09 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Loss of linguistic diversity is viewed by many as one of the great ecological disasters of the twenty-first century, and the Romance language family has not been spared. This chapter deals with unique challenges to the study and documentation of endangered Romance languages. We consider the question of language vs dialect, and the added problems faced by endangered varieties deemed "dialects". The role played by the highly prestigious and structurally related national languages of the countries in which the endangered varieties are spoken is analysed within the fieldwork context, as speakersmaypossess a spectrum of linguistic abilities, from the national standard to an archaic local variety. Fieldwork methods and language documentation/description are discussed, along with the types of resources produced and their accessibility.

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• Palatalization

  2016-06-30 · 5 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter provides a structural overview of the varieties of palatalization found in Romance varieties today as well as considering diachronic issues. It covers the emergence in Romance of a new order of palatals, both fricatives and affricates, due to original yod, and how new, secondary sources of palatalizing yod developed from asyllabic high vowels; diatopic differences in the palatalizing effects of front vowels, in the susceptibility of different underlying segments, in the palatalization of consonantal clusters, and in the palatalizing effects of postconsonantal laterals; positional differences in conditioning different palatal outcomes; morphologization of palatal/non-palatal alternations; recent waves of palatalization. Specific topics dealt with include: Latin yod and its effects; morphological consequences of palatalization by yod; consonant + front vowel palatalization; velar stop + front vowel; velar stop + a; non-dorsal consonant + front vowel; morphological consequences of front vowel palatalization; consonant + consonant palatalization; consonant + lateral; velar stop + coronal consonant.

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• The phonology of postverbal pronouns in Romance languages

  Romance languages and linguistic theory · 2016-01-14 · 21 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In many Romance varieties, the verb in imperative verb + (postverbal) pronoun phrases retains primary stress: Italian/Spanish: [kómpra]/[kómpra-melo] ‘buy!’/‘buy me it!’. However, in others varieties, stress in these phrases may be realized on a different syllable: [kompra-meló], [kompra-mélo], [kompra-mélozo]. In this paper, I address questions that have puzzled linguists for some time: Why is there a stress shift when enclitic pronouns are added to the imperative verb? How is the position of the stressed syllable determined? I propose that many factors are involved, including morpho-syntactic factors (the presence of a weak or a clitic pronoun, which are prosodized differently), phonological processes (the mapping of syntactic to prosodic structure), and phonetic processes (tonal association to metrically prominent syllables).

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• Where did all the dialects go? Aspects of the influence of Italian on dialects

  Forum Italicum A Journal of Italian Studies · 2014-05-14 · 14 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The influence of standard Italian on the minor Romance languages spoken in Italy (i.e. the Italian dialects) permeates all aspects of their grammar. In this article, I provide an example of the way in which Italian prosody can affect dialects, a poorly studied type of influence. I show that a speaker may have a range of options available when speaking ‘dialect,’ including forms that are influenced by Italian to a greater or lesser degree.

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Frequent coauthors

• Veronica Miatto

  Stony Brook University

  26 shared

• Richard S. Kayne

  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

  26 shared

• Yves Siena

  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

  25 shared

• María-Rosa Lloret

  Walter de Gruyter (Germany)

  25 shared

• Magdalena Idzik

  25 shared

• Aniello De Santo

  University of Utah

  25 shared

• Gabriela Alboiu

  Walter de Gruyter (Germany)

  25 shared

• Luiz-Carlos Schwindt

  Walter de Gruyter (Germany)

  25 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  UCLA

  1989