The morphology of Romanian palatalization

Resumen

In this paper, I will argue that the asyllabic /i/ - a recurrent inflectional element in final position in Romanian words - is not a phoneme of the Romanian vowel system. I will present arguments which sustain that the morphological marker -i leads to the palatalization of the preceding consonant, resulting in a positional allophone of the consonant phoneme in complementary distribution with it.