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Preference Laws and Gradient Change: Selected Developments in Romance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Robert W. Murray
Robert W. Murray*
Affiliation:
University of Calgary
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Extract

This paper has two purposes. The first is to focus attention on the gradient nature of sound change. This characteristic of sound change, although an important one, is often overlooked. King (1969: 122), for example, states: “Phonological changes tend to affect natural classes of sounds (p, t, k, high vowels, voiced stops) because rules that affect natural classes are simpler than rules that apply only to single segments.” This perspective obscures the generalization pattern of phonological processes, for a particular process typically affects a subsection of a natural class and then may (or may not) generalize to other members of the particular class or even to other classes. The second purpose of this paper is to account for selected cases of gradient phonological change in Italian and other Romance languages on the basis of a partial theory of syllable structure preferences.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , June 1987 , pp. 115 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1987

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