The voicing of intervocalic stops in Old Tuscan and probabilistic sound change
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Stefano Canalis
Abstract
The article examines the dual outcome of Latin intervocalic /p t k/ in Old Tuscan. While these stops remain voiceless in most of the Tuscan lexicon, a significant number of words are voiced. The prevailing opinion is that preservation of voicelessness is the native outcome, and that the words displaying voicing were borrowed from Romance languages in which intervocalic voicing was systematic. However, a number of facts militate against this hypothesis, including the presence of voicing in Tuscan words that are unattested or maintain a voiceless stop in the supposed donor languages. The results of a corpus-based analysis of an Old Tuscan lexicon show that the distribution of the voiced outcomes is phonologically conditioned (contra the borrowing hypothesis), as they are more likely if the stop was velar, next to low(er) vowels, next to stress and if followed by a liquid consonant. These results are also an example of sound change with clear and fine-grained phonological conditioning but a non-systematic outcome; irregularity was probably caused by the allophonic nature of Old Tuscan voicing and by its interaction with another lenition process.
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
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- Graphophonology and anachronic phonology Notes on episodes in the history of pseudo-phonology
- The voicing of intervocalic stops in Old Tuscan and probabilistic sound change
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- Book Reviews
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Graphophonology and anachronic phonology Notes on episodes in the history of pseudo-phonology
- The voicing of intervocalic stops in Old Tuscan and probabilistic sound change
- On saying two things at once The historical semantics and pragmatics of Old English emotion words
- Third-person singular zero in the Norfolk dialect A re-assessment
- Relative productivity potentials of Dutch verbal inflection patterns
- On Middle English she, sho: A refurbished narrative
- Out of the spatial domain ‘Out’-intensifiers in the history of English
- On the syntax and semantics of the past perfect participle and gerundive in early New Indo Arian Evidence from Eastern Pahari
- The correlation between motion event encoding and path verb lexicon size in the Indo-European language family
- Book Reviews
