<OT> New ROA posting: Syncope in Spanish and Portuguese: The Diachrony of Hispano-Romance Phonotactics

[Rutgers Optimality Archive]

ROA 935-1107

Syncope in Spanish and Portuguese: The Diachrony of Hispano-Romance Phonotactics

Eric Lief <ericlief at gmail.com>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=935


Abstract:
This dissertation examines syncope in the development of
Latin to Hispano-Romance (Spanish and Portuguese). Syncope,
the loss of certain unstressed word-medial vowels, had a
profound effect on the phonotactics of Latin and Romance.

The first part of this dissertation examines the consonantal
phonotactics of Latin, Spanish, and Portuguese. Since Latin
is a very good reference point for many of the changes which
occurred during the development of these two languages,
a complete description of the sound pattern of this language
is crucial before addressing the issue of syncope. In Chapter
1, a set of phonotactic generalizations are formulated for
word-initial, word-final, and word-medial consonants and
consonant sequences in Classical Latin. Chapters 2 and 3
investigate the consonantal phonotactics of Spanish and
Portuguese, outlining the major structural similarities
and differences in the development of these two languages.
Word-final stop deletion and apocope (word-final vowel deletion)
is also addressed here, and it is demonstrated how the restrictio
n of only sonorants and /s/ to syllable codas (coda condition)
constrained the application of apocope (though in different
degrees) early on in Hispano-Romance.

Chapters 4-6 address syncope in Spanish and Portuguese from
a diachronic perspective. Very painstaking effort has been
made in collecting as much data as possible, from as wide
a variety of phonological environments aspossible. Electronic
corpora such as Patrologia Latina for Latin and Real Academia
for Spanish have been invaluable sources, especially for
frequency data. Close attention is paid to the interaction
of syncope and obstruent voicing/voiced obstruent deletion
as a means to chronologize the development of syncope in
Spanish and Portuguese.

Chapter 6 examines the effects found to be significant in
syncope. Such effects can be classified as either segmental,
syllabic, or phonotactic (attestation). After discussion
of these effects, the theoretical implications of this dissertati
on are examined. In light of the recent interest in Romance
syncope within the framework of Optimality Theory (e.g.
Hartkemeyer 2000), an OT formulation of some of the constraints
found to be significant in Hispano-Romance is given, and
two views of phonotactic change (the simultaneous versus
stepwise accounts) are evaluated.

Comments:
Keywords: syncope, spanish, portuguese, latin, romance, phonotactics,
historical phonology, sound change, language change, phonotactic
change, lenition, syllable-structure, constraints, relative chronology
Areas: Historical Linguistics, Phonology
Type: PhD Dissertation

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=935