ABSTRACT
The current work provides an overview of theoretical concepts and approaches to the study of Spanish diachronic phonology and explores a number of the principal changes that characterize the phonological evolution of Spanish from Latin. We survey a variety of contemporary approaches, both rule-based and constraint-based, including treatments that rely on nonlinear and geometric representations of features, that make use of various levels of prosodic and metrical constituency, and that adopt multiple functional considerations based in both perception and production. A major focus of the chapter is the extent to which phonological treatments increasingly exploit our growing understanding of the subtle articulatory and acoustic/perceptual details of human speech, as in listener-based accounts, in which perceptual biases may lead to reanalysis of underlying forms. We also emphasize the considerable role of structural and systemic influences: syllable structure, for example, and the ways it interacts with the phonetic component, drives much phonological change in Hispano-Romance and allows for a more perspicuous understanding of the mechanisms underlying some change. The chapter concludes with an extended sketch of a gesture-based analysis of the origins of Spanish palatal sonorants /ʎ, ɲ/, in which we claim that an increasing degree of intergestural timing and overlap was a response to syllable-based dynamics.
