Romance plurals

In this paper I argue that eastern Romance (Italian and Romanian) plurals are underlyingly similar to their western Romance equivalents (e.g. Spanish and old French): they are built from an unmarked (singular) stem and a plural morpheme. Throughout history, this morpheme has fundamentally preserved its formal shape: Romance plural corresponds to the morphophonological feature /coronal/. This feature is realized both in the vocalic alternations of eastern Romance plurals, and in the consonantal [s] plurals of western Romance.