Palatal Sound Change in the Romance Languages: Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives
ISBN: 9780191845000
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Historical and Diachronic Linguistics Phonetics and Phonology;

This book presents a thorough investigation of the main diachronic changes that have taken place in the palatal sounds of the Romance languages, as well as their current patterns of synchronic variation. Andre Zampaulo draws on extensive data not only from diachronic sources, but also from a range of current phonetic, phonological, and dialectal studies to motivate a formal, constraint-based account of palatal sound change. The analysis takes into account the role of phonetic information in the shaping of phonological patterns, approaching sound change from its inception during the speaker-listener interaction and formalizing it as the difference in constraint ranking between the grammar of the speaker and that of the listener-turned-speaker. The volume offers insights into how and why similar types of change may take place in different varieties and/or the same language at different times, and will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in historical linguistics, phonetics and phonology, Romance linguistics, and dialectology more broadly.


Andre Zampaulo is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Linguistics at California State University, Fullerton. He received his PhD in Hispanic Linguistics in 2013 from The Ohio State University, specializing in phonetics, phonology, and historical linguistics. His work has been published in edited volumes from Routledge and John Benjamins and in journals such as Diachronica and Revista de Historia de la Lengua Espanola. He is the author of Os sons do portugues: Uma introducao pratica a fonetica e a pronuncia da lingua portuguesa (Routledge, 2018).

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