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This book provides an integrated account of the phonetic causes of the diachronic processes of palatalization, assibilation, and affrication. It draws on a variety of historical, dialectological, and phonetic data from a wide range of language families, including Romance, Bantu, Slavic, and Germanic.
List of contents
- Series preface
- Preface
- List of figures
- List of abbreviations
- 1: Introduction
- 2: Velar softening
- 3: Velar palatalization
- 4: Velar assibilation
- 5: Labial softening
- 6: Conclusions
- References
- Index of language families, languages, and dialects
- General index
About the author
Daniel Recasens is Full Professor of Catalan Philology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Director of the Phonetics Laboratory at the Institut d'Estudis Catalans. His research interests include the interarticulatory mechanisms in speech production, the phonetic causes of sound change, and the phonetics-phonology interface. He is currently Associate Editor of
Phonetica and a member of the Editorial Board of the
Journal of the International Phonetic Association, and has served as Chair of the 15th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (2003) and as Vice-President of the International Phonetic Association (2007-2011). His books include
oarticulation and Sound Change in Romance (Benjamins, 2014) and
The Production of Consonant Clusters (De Gruyter, 2018) and his work has appeared in journals such as
Journal of Phonetics and
Phonetica and in edited volumes from OUP, Benjamins, and De Gruyter.
Summary
This book provides an integrated account of the phonetic causes of the diachronic processes of palatalization, assibilation, and affrication. It draws on a variety of historical, dialectological, and phonetic data from a wide range of language families, including Romance, Bantu, Slavic, and Germanic.
Additional text
This monograph investigates the phonetic factors driving sound change, focusing on the palatalization and assibilation of velar stops (velar softening) and the softening of labial stops and labiodental fricatives (labial softening). The study covers Romance dialects, Slavic languages, Greek, Albanian, Romanian, and Bantu languages, offering new insights into diachronic processes. It examines how articulatory and acoustic factors shape sound changes, emphasizing how vocal tract configurations influence sound transitions.
