ABSTRACT
A wide variety both of lexicalized historical developments and synchronic alternations exemplify ‘consonant weakening’. The first category contains a few types of phonological change which account for the vast majority of cases distinguishing the consonant structure of the Italo-Romance lexicon from that of Latin. Salient among these are: assimilations (e.g., dictu(m) > It. ['detto] ‘said’, septe(m) > It. ['sεtte] ‘seven’, capsa(m) > It. ['kassa] ‘chest’); contact simplification of clusters (e.g., integru(m) > It. [in'tεro] ‘whole’, mense(m) > It. ['mese], constare > It. [kos'tare] ‘to cost’), and a sizeable gamut of palatalizations (see Ch. 3). But it is the category traditionally known as ‘intervocalic weakening’ which has perhaps attracted most scholarly interest, partly because the phenomena involved are significant both from a diachronic and from a synchronic perspective, partly because of the ample spectrum of dialectally differentiated outcomes within Italy, many of which offer crucial insights into developments elsewhere in Romance. We concentrate here on the history and synchrony of intervocalic /p/, /t/, /k/ and their geminate counterparts.
