ABSTRACT
This chapter summarize the principal phonological developments from Latin to Italian. A number of sound changes which have had a major impact on morphological structure will receive a more detailed investigation. Prosodic phonology is concerned with domains or ‘stretches of sounds’, greater than the single consonant or vowel segment. Latin stress placement was entirely predictable on the basis of phonological information. The position of Italian stress is, in contrast, often impossible to predict without reference to non-phonological information. The dialects of central and southern Italy, and Sardinian, are distinguished among the Romance varieties in that they have retained Latin long consonants. Italian displays a relationship between stress and syllable structure which is an inversion of that obtaining in CL. Whereas CL stress was predictable partly on the basis of syllable structure, syllable structure in Italian becomes partly predictable from stress, and from certain other aspects of word structure.
