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7 The evolution of Latin stress into Romance with special consideration of French

  • Haike Jacobs
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Abstract

This chapter describes the major changes that took place in the evolution from Latin stress to the modern Romance languages. Unstressed vowel deletion, which was systematic in the evolution of French, first as syncope and later as apocope, is argued to be the continuous effect of a constraint already operative in Latin: the avoidance of vocalic substance in the weak part of a foot. The constraint first targeted the uneven trochee for syncope and later on in the evolution of French, the syllabic trochee for apocope. The chapter provides an OT analysis of the way in which word-internal and word-final unstressed vowel deletion ultimately led to systematic word-final stress in Old French and shows how, once the last proparoxytonic words had been adapted in three different ways, the change from word-final to phrase-final stress was completed.

Abstract

This chapter describes the major changes that took place in the evolution from Latin stress to the modern Romance languages. Unstressed vowel deletion, which was systematic in the evolution of French, first as syncope and later as apocope, is argued to be the continuous effect of a constraint already operative in Latin: the avoidance of vocalic substance in the weak part of a foot. The constraint first targeted the uneven trochee for syncope and later on in the evolution of French, the syllabic trochee for apocope. The chapter provides an OT analysis of the way in which word-internal and word-final unstressed vowel deletion ultimately led to systematic word-final stress in Old French and shows how, once the last proparoxytonic words had been adapted in three different ways, the change from word-final to phrase-final stress was completed.

Heruntergeladen am 20.12.2025 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110550283-008/html
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