This volume brings together a number of ground-breaking papers in the theory of 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. André 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.

Vols. for 1985- issued in two parts: pt.1 being the Papers from the regional meeting, pt.2 being the papers of the Parasession. Previous to 1985 the Parasession papers were issued as separately analyzed monographs.

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.