The nine papers included in this book investigate a variety of topics on sound change in several Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, and Romanian) using different sources of evidence and several methodologies. This collection of papers contributes significantly to our knowledge about the inception and diffusion of sound change and the typological factors which constrain their implementation. The book should be of particular interest to phoneticians and phonologists insofar as, among other issues, it deals with patterns of syllable structure, degree of stability of vowel contrasts, and preference for certain consonant sequences and sound replacements over others.0Contents: Giovanni Abete: How phonotactic patterns contribute to the emergence and spread of /r/ metathesis in Neapolitan - Anita Berit Hansen: Parisian French ?unstable e? in word-initial syllables ? engaged in a lexically diffused process of stabilization? Evidence from repeated real-time studies - Mikolaj Nkollo: Empty and non-empty onsets in European Portuguese preverbal accusative clitic pronouns. A corpus-based inquiry into a diachronic sound change - Rosalba Nodari/Silvia Calamai: Degemination in marginal Tuscan speech: temporal analysis in legacy speech data - Daniel Recasens: The historical evolution of voiced palatoalveolar fricatives and affricates in Catalan -Margaret E. L. Renwick: Mid vowel variation and contrast in regional Standard Italian - Assumpció Rost Bagudanch: First considerations about /n/ flapping in the evolution of Spanish - John M. Ryan: Open syllable drift and the evolution of Classical Latin open and closed syllable structure into Spanish, Italian and Neapolitan - Fernando Sánchez-Miret: Elision of the definite article -/l/ in Romanian: setting out the issues. 0ISBN 9783969390610 (Hardbound). LINCOM Studies in Romance Linguistics 84. 217pp.

This volume explores several recurring topics in Romance phonetics and phonology, with a special focus on the segment, syllable, word, and phrase levels of analysis. An international team of experts and junior researchers present research that ranges from the low-level mechanical processes involved in speech production and perception to high-level representation and computation, based on data from across the Romance language family, including from varieties that are less widely studied. The book is divided into five parts. In the first, chapters present acoustic studies, examining topics such as Italian anaphonesis and voiceless fricative sibilants in Galician, while chapters in part two turn to articulatory studies of features including three-consonant onsets in Romanian and rhotic variation in Tuscan Italian. The focus of the third part is perception, and includes studies of perceived phrasing in French and perceptual cues for individual voice quality, while part four examines phonological issues such as Galician mid-vowel reduction and sibilant voicing in Spanish. Chapters in the final part of the volume look at the effects of production and perception on issues in language acquisition. The book draws on a range of experimental and methodological approaches and will be of interest not only to scholars of Romance linguistics but also to all those working in phonetics and phonology from graduate level upwards.

This volume should be of great interest to phoneticians, phonologists, and both historical and cognitive linguists. Using data from the Romance languages for the most part, the book explores the phonetic motivation of several sound changes, e.g., glide insertions and elisions, vowel and consonant insertions, elisions, assimilations and dissimilations. Within the framework of the DAC (degree of articulatory constraint) model of coarticulation, it clearly demonstrates that the typology and direction of these sound changes may very largely be accounted for by the coarticulatory effects occurring between adjacent or neighbouring phonetic segments, and by the degrees of articulatory constraint imposed by speakers on the production of vowels and consonants. The phonetically-based explanations presented here are formulated on the basis of coarticulation data from speech production and perception research carried out during the last fifty years and are complemented with data on the co-occurrence of phonetic segments in lexical forms of the languages being considered. Attention is also paid to the role that positional and prosodic factors play in sound change implementation, as well as to the cognitive and peripheral strategies involved in segmental replacements, elisions and insertions.

This handbook is structured in two parts: it provides, on the one hand, a comprehensive (synchronic) overview of the phonetics and phonology (including prosody) of a breadth of Romance languages and focuses, on the other hand, on central topics of research in Romance segmental and suprasegmental phonology, including comparative and diachronic perspectives. Phonetics and phonology have always been a core discipline in Romance linguistics: the wide synchronic variety of languages and dialects derived from spoken Latin is extensively explored in numerous corpus and atlas projects, and for quite a few of these varieties there is also more or less ample documentation of at least some of their diachronic stages. This rich empirical database offers excellent testing grounds for different theoretical approaches and allows for substantial insights into phonological structuring as well as into (incipient, ongoing, or concluded) processes of phonological change. The volume can be read both as a state-of-the-art report of research in the field and as a manual of Romance languages with special emphasis on the key topics of phonetics and phonology.

This volume is a collection of cutting-edge research papers written by well-known researchers in the field of Romance phonetics and phonology. An important goal of this book is to bridge the gap between traditional Romance linguistics — with its long and rich tradition in data collection, cross-language comparison, and phonetic variation — and laboratory phonology work. The book is organized around three main themes: segmental processes, prosody, and the acquisition of segments and prosody. The various articles provide new empirical data on production, perception, sound change, first and second language learning, rhythm and intonation, presenting a state-of-the-art overview of research in laboratory phonology centred on Romance languages. The Romance data are used to test the predictions of a number of theoretical frameworks such as gestural phonology, exemplar models, generative phonology and optimality theory. The book will constitute a useful companion volume for phoneticians, phonologists and researchers investigating sound structure in Romance languages, and will serve to generate further interest in laboratory phonology.