Drawing on a wide range of philological and linguistic materials, Rodney Sampson provides for the first time a detailed comparative study tracing the rise and pattern of the evolution of nasal vowels in Romance; a family of language in which vowel nasalization has been richly represented. Developments across all the standard varieties and some non-standard varieties are considered, enabling broad characteristics of vowel nasalization in Romance to be identified.

This book presents for the first time an in-depth historical account of vowel prosthesis in the Romance languages. Vowel prosthesis is a change which involves the appearance of a non-etymological vowel at the beginning of a word: a familiar example is the initial e which appears in the development of Latin sperare to Spanish esperar and French espérer to hope. Despite its widespread incidence in the Romance languages, it has remained poorly studied. In his wide-ranging comparative coverage, Professor Sampson identifies three main categories of vowel prosthesis that have occurred and explores in detail their historical trajectory and the relationship between them. The presentation draws freely throughout on the rich philological materials available from Romance and brings to light various unexpected changes in the productive use of prosthesis through time. For example in French and Italian (which is Tuscan-based), one category of prosthesis became well established in the early Middle Ages only to lose productivity and subsequently become moribund. With its extensive use of empirical data and findings from theoretical linguistics, the book offers a thorough and revealing account of a fascinating chapter in the phonological history of Romance.

Die Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie zählen zu den renommiertesten Fachpublikationen der Romanistik. Sie pflegen ein gesamtromanisches Profil, das neben den Nationalsprachen auch die weniger im Fokus stehenden romanischen Sprachen mit einschließt. In der Reihe erscheinen ausgewählte Monographien und Sammelbände zur Sprachwissenschaft in ihrer ganzen Breite, zur mediävistischen Literaturwissenschaft und zur Editionsphilologie.

The present volume presents a selection of the revised and peer-reviewed proceedings articles of the 50th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 50) which was hosted virtually by the faculty and students from the University of Texas at Austin. With contributions from rising and senior scholars from Europe and the Americas, the volume demonstrates the breadth of research in contemporary Romance linguistics with articles that apply corpus-based and laboratory methods, as well as theory, to explore the structure, use, and development of the Romance languages. The articles cover a wide range of fields including morphosyntax, semantics, language variation and change, sociophonetics, historical linguistics, language acquisition, and computational linguistics. In an introductory article, the editors document the sudden transition of LSRL 50 to a virtual format and acknowledge those who helped them to ensure the continuity of this annual scholarly meeting.

This volume contains a selection of nineteen peer-reviewed papers from the 42nd annual Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) held at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah, in 2012. The contributions cover a wide range of current topics in the areas of phonetics, phonology, syntax, interfaces, and diachronic Romance linguistics, with an emphasis on experimental approaches, in connection to L1 and L2 acquisition, code-switching and psycholinguistics. Among the languages and varieties of Romance analyzed are French (Old, Modern, and Norman), Portuguese (Brazilian and Classical), and Spanish (Modern and Judeo-Spanish), but also Italo-Romance, Latin, and Romanian. In a comparative tradition, the discussions extend to languages outside Romance, such as dialects of Arabic, Germanic, and Palenquero creole. This collection of papers at the forefront of research contributes to our understanding of Romance languages, and to the influence of Romance linguistics, and will be of interest to scholars in Romance and general linguistics.

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 book explores recurring topics in Romance phonetics and phonology. Topics studied range 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.

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.

Nasality, whether part of a consonant or vowel, has certain phonetic and phonological characteristics that lead to outcomes seen time and again in languages with and without common ancestries. Spanish and Portuguese constitute a particularly fruitful language pairing for studying phonological aspects of synchronic and diachronic variation, given their intimate relationship as well as the array of dialectal variation in each. This research monograph offers a comprehensive exploration of nasals and nasalization in Spanish and Portuguese with a special focus on the role of perception in order to provide insight into how perception informs models of phonetics, phonology and language change. Of interest to researchers and advanced students alike, this volume integrates phonetic and phonological models of speech perception and production, and discusses these with regards to original empirical research on the perception of nasal place features and vowel nasalization by listeners of Peninsular Spanish, Cuban Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.