The Romance languages, despite their overall similarity, display interesting internal diversity which can be captured only very partially by looking at the six major standard languages, as typological databases often do. This diversity spans over all the levels of linguistic analysis, from phonology to morphology and syntax. Rather than making a long list of features, with no space to go much beyond their mere mention, the article focusses on just four main areas in a little more detail, trying to develop, if minimally, a discussion on their theoretical and methodological import.
The comparison with the full-world typological background given by the WALS Online shows that the differences within Romance may reach the level of general typological relevance. While this is probably not the case in their rather mainstream segmental phonology, it surely holds regarding nominal pluralization and the syntax of negation, which are both areas where the Romance languages have often distanced themselves quite significantly from their common ancestor, Latin. The morphological marking of nominal plural displays four values out of the seven recorded in WALS, adding a further one unattested there, namely subtraction; the negation strategies, although uniformly particle-like, cover all the five values found in WALS concerning linear order. Finally, Romance languages suggest several intriguing issues related with head-marking and dependent-marking constructions, again innovating against the substantially dependent-marking uniformity characteristic of Latin.
Article
Typological Diversity Within the Romance Languages
Davide Ricca
Article
Phonological Variation and Change in Brazilian Portuguese
Elisa Battisti
Brazilian Portuguese is the native language of more than 200 million people living in Brazil. Spoken in South America since around the year 1500, Brazilian Portuguese has peculiar phonological traits, many of them variable. The extensive language contact that has taken place in Brazil caused Brazilian Portuguese to break up into regional dialects. Various phonological processes affect Brazilian Portuguese at the segmental and suprasegmental levels. Some of the processes target consonants, such as the regressive palatalization of /t, d/, the fricatization of /r/ in syllabic onset; some processes target vowels, such as the raising and lowering of unstressed /e, o/ vowels; others target the intonation of utterances, such as the rising of the nuclear stress of yes–no questions. The results of several empirical studies on varieties of Brazilian Portuguese show that not all of the processes correspond to change in progress in Brazilian Portuguese; some of them are stable variables. They also show that not every variable is present in all dialects and that some variables are socially salient and stigmatized. Compared to present European Portuguese, the phonology of Brazilian Portuguese seems to be conservative in some aspects, such as in the raising of vowels in unstressed, word-final syllables; innovative in others, such as in the vocalization of /l/ in syllabic coda.
Article
Topicalization in the Romance Languages
Silvio Cruschina
Topic and topicalization are key notions to understand processes of syntactic and prosodic readjustments in Romance. More specifically, topicalization refers to the syntactic mechanisms and constructions available in a language to mark an expression as the topic of the sentence. Despite the lack of a uniform definition of topic, often based on the notions of aboutness or givenness, significant advances have been made in Romance linguistics since the 1990s, yielding a better understanding of the topicalization constructions, their properties, and their grammatical correlates. Prosodically, topics are generally described as being contained in independent intonational phrases. The syntactic and pragmatic characteristics of a specific topicalization construction, by contrast, depend both on the form of resumption of the dislocated topic within the clause and on the types of topic (aboutness, given, and contrastive topics). We can thus distinguish between hanging topic (left dislocation) (HTLD) and clitic left-dislocation (ClLD) for sentence-initial topics, and clitic right-dislocation (ClRD) for sentence-final dislocated constituents. These topicalization constructions are available in most Romance languages, although variation may affect the type and the obligatory presence of the resumptive element.
Scholars working on topic and topicalization in the Romance languages have also addressed controversial issues such as the relation between topics and subjects, both grammatical (nominative) subjects and ‘oblique’ subjects such as dative experiencers and locative expressions. Moreover, topicalization has been discussed for medieval Romance, in conjunction with its alleged V2 syntactic status. Some topicalization constructions such as subject inversion, especially in the non-null subject Romance languages, and Resumptive Preposing may indeed be viewed as potential residues of medieval V2 property in contemporary Romance.
Article
Balkan-Romance
Adina Dragomirescu
Balkan-Romance is represented by Romanian and its historical dialects: Daco-Romanian (broadly known as Romanian), Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian (see article “Morphological and Syntactic Variation and Change in Romanian” in this encyclopedia). The external history of these varieties is often unclear, given the historical events that took place in the Lower Danubian region: the conquest of this territory by the Roman Empire for a short period and the successive Slavic invasions. Moreover, the earliest preserved writing in Romanian only dates from the 16th century. Between the Roman presence in the Balkans and the first attested text, there is a gap of more than 1,000 years, a period in which Romanian emerged, the dialectal separation took place, and the Slavic influence had effects especially on the lexis of Romanian.
In the 16th century, in the earliest old Romanian texts, the language already displayed the main features of modern Romanian: the vowels /ə/ and /ɨ/; the nominative-accusative versus genitive-dative case distinction; analytical case markers, such as the genitive marker al; the functional prepositions a and la; the proclitic genitive-dative marker lui; the suffixal definite article; polydefinite structures; possessive affixes; rich verbal inflection, with both analytic and synthetic forms and with three auxiliaries (‘have’, ‘be’, and ‘want’); the supine, not completely verbalized at the time; two types of infinitives, with the ‘short’ one on a path toward becoming verbal and the ‘long’ one specializing as a noun; null subjects; nonfinite verb forms with lexical subjects; the mechanism for differential object marking and clitic doubling with slightly more vacillating rules than in the present-day language; two types of passives; strict negative concord; the SVO and VSO word orders; adjectives placed mainly in the postnominal position; a rich system of pronominal clitics; prepositions requiring the accusative and the genitive; and a large inventory of subordinating conjunctions introducing complement clauses.
Most of these features are also attested in the trans-Danubian varieties (Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian), which were also strongly influenced by the various languages they have entered in direct contact with: Greek, Albanian, Macedonian, Croatian, and so forth. These source languages have had a major influence in the vocabulary of the trans-Danubian varieties and certain consequences in the shape of their grammatical system. The differences between Daco-Romanian and the trans-Danubian varieties have also resulted from the preservation of archaic features in the latter or from innovations that took place only there.
Article
Phonetic Correlates of Sex, Gender and Sexual Orientation
Adrian P. Simpson and Melanie Weirich
Speech carries a wealth of information about the speaker aside from any verbal message ranging from emotional state (sad, happy, bored, etc.) to illness (e.g., cold). Central features are a speaker’s gender and their sexual orientation. In part this is an inevitable product of differences in speakers’ anatomical dimensions, for example on average males have lower pitched voices than females due to longer, thicker vocal cords that vibrate more slowly. Arguably much more information has been learned by a speaker as they construct their gender or identify with a particular sexual orientation. Differences in speech already begin in young children, before any marked gender-related anatomical differences develop, emphasizing the importance of behavioral patterns. Gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation are encoded in speech in a range of different phonetic parameters relating to both phonation (activity of the vocal folds) and articulation (dimensions and configuration of the supraglottal cavities), as well as the use of pitch patterns and differences in voice quality (the way in which the vocal folds vibrate). Differences in the size and configuration of the supraglottal cavities give rise to differences in the size of the acoustic vowel space as well as subtle differences in the production of individual sounds, such as the sibilant [s]. Furthermore, significant and systematic gender-specific differences have been found in the average duration of utterances and individual sounds, which in turn have been found to have a complex relationship to the perception of tempo.
Article
Articulatory Phonology
Marianne Pouplier
One of the most fundamental problems in research on spoken language is to understand how the categorical, systemic knowledge that speakers have in the form of a phonological grammar maps onto the continuous, high-dimensional physical speech act that transmits the linguistic message. The invariant units of phonological analysis have no invariant analogue in the signal—any given phoneme can manifest itself in many possible variants, depending on context, speech rate, utterance position and the like, and the acoustic cues for a given phoneme are spread out over time across multiple linguistic units. Speakers and listeners are highly knowledgeable about the lawfully structured variation in the signal and they skillfully exploit articulatory and acoustic trading relations when speaking and perceiving. For the scientific description of spoken language understanding this association between abstract, discrete categories and continuous speech dynamics remains a formidable challenge. Articulatory Phonology and the associated Task Dynamic model present one particular proposal on how to step up to this challenge using the mathematics of dynamical systems with the central insight being that spoken language is fundamentally based on the production and perception of linguistically defined patterns of motion. In Articulatory Phonology, primitive units of phonological representation are called gestures. Gestures are defined based on linear second order differential equations, giving them inherent spatial and temporal specifications. Gestures control the vocal tract at a macroscopic level, harnessing the many degrees of freedom in the vocal tract into low-dimensional control units. Phonology, in this model, thus directly governs the spatial and temporal orchestration of vocal tract actions.
Article
Tonogenesis
Alexis Michaud and Bonny Sands
Tonogenesis is the development of distinctive tone from earlier non-tonal contrasts. A well-understood case is Vietnamese (similar in its essentials to that of Chinese and many languages of the Tai-Kadai and Hmong-Mien language families), where the loss of final laryngeal consonants led to the creation of three tones, and the tones later multiplied as voicing oppositions on initial consonants waned. This is by no means the only attested diachronic scenario, however. Besides well-known cases of tonogenesis in East Asia, this survey includes discussions of less well-known cases of tonogenesis from language families including Athabaskan, Chadic, Khoe and Niger-Congo. There is tonogenetic potential in various series of phonemes: glottalized versus plain consonants, unvoiced versus voiced, aspirated versus unaspirated, geminates versus simple (and, more generally, tense versus lax), and even among vowels, whose intrinsic fundamental frequency can transphonologize to tone. We draw attention to tonogenetic triggers that are not so well-known, such as [+ATR] vowels, aspirates and morphotonological alternations. The ways in which these common phonetic precursors to tone play out in a given language depend on phonological factors, as well as on other dimensions of a language’s structure and on patterns of language contact, resulting in a great diversity of evolutionary paths in tone systems. In some language families (such as Niger-Congo and Khoe), recent tonal developments are increasingly well understood, but working out the origin of the earliest tonal contrasts (which are likely to date back thousands of years earlier than tonogenesis among Sino-Tibetan languages, for instance) remains a mid- to long-term research goal for comparative-historical research.
Article
The Phonetics of Prosody
Amalia Arvaniti
Prosody is an umbrella term used to cover a variety of interconnected and interacting phenomena, namely stress, rhythm, phrasing, and intonation. The phonetic expression of prosody relies on a number of parameters, including duration, amplitude, and fundamental frequency (F0). The same parameters are also used to encode lexical contrasts (such as tone), as well as paralinguistic phenomena (such as anger, boredom, and excitement). Further, the exact function and organization of the phonetic parameters used for prosody differ across languages. These considerations make it imperative to distinguish the linguistic phenomena that make up prosody from their phonetic exponents, and similarly to distinguish between the linguistic and paralinguistic uses of the latter. A comprehensive understanding of prosody relies on the idea that speech is prosodically organized into phrasal constituents, the edges of which are phonetically marked in a number of ways, for example, by articulatory strengthening in the beginning and lengthening at the end. Phrases are also internally organized either by stress, that is around syllables that are more salient relative to others (as in English and Spanish), or by the repetition of a relatively stable tonal pattern over short phrases (as in Korean, Japanese, and French). Both types of organization give rise to rhythm, the perception of speech as consisting of groups of a similar and repetitive pattern. Tonal specification over phrases is also used for intonation purposes, that is, to mark phrasal boundaries, and express information structure and pragmatic meaning. Taken together, the components of prosody help with the organization and planning of speech, while prosodic cues are used by listeners during both language acquisition and speech processing. Importantly, prosody does not operate independently of segments; rather, it profoundly affects segment realization, making the incorporation of an understanding of prosody into experimental design essential for most phonetic research.
Article
Phonetics of Sign Language
Martha Tyrone
Sign phonetics is the study of how sign languages are produced and perceived, by native as well as by non-native signers. Most research on sign phonetics has focused on American Sign Language (ASL), but there are many different sign languages around the world, and several of these, including British Sign Language, Taiwan Sign Language, and Sign Language of the Netherlands, have been studied at the level of phonetics. Sign phonetics research can focus on individual lexical signs or on the movements of the nonmanual articulators that accompany those signs. The production and perception of a sign language can be influenced by phrase structure, linguistic register, the signer’s linguistic background, the visual perception mechanism, the anatomy and physiology of the hands and arms, and many other factors. What sets sign phonetics apart from the phonetics of spoken languages is that the two language modalities use different mechanisms of production and perception, which could in turn result in structural differences between modalities. Most studies of sign phonetics have been based on careful analyses of video data. Some studies have collected kinematic limb movement data during signing and carried out quantitative analyses of sign production related to, for example, signing rate, phonetic environment, or phrase position. Similarly, studies of sign perception have recorded participants’ ability to identify and discriminate signs, depending, for example, on slight variations in the signs’ forms or differences in the participants’ language background. Most sign phonetics research is quantitative and lab-based.
Article
Consonant Harmony
Gunnar Hansson
The term consonant harmony refers to a class of systematic sound patterns, in which consonants interact in some assimilatory way even though they are not adjacent to each other in the word. Such long-distance assimilation can sometimes hold across a significant stretch of intervening vowels and consonants, such as in Samala (Ineseño Chumash) /s-am-net-in-waʃ/ → [ʃamnetiniwaʃ] “they did it to you”, where the alveolar sibilant /s‑/ of the 3.sbj prefix assimilates to the postalveolar sibilant /ʃ/ of the past suffix /‑waʃ/ across several intervening syllables that contain a variety of non-sibilant consonants. While consonant harmony most frequently involves coronal-specific contrasts, like in the Samala case, there are numerous cases of assimilation in other phonological properties, such as laryngeal features, nasality, secondary articulation, and even constriction degree. Not all cases of consonant harmony result in overt alternations, like the [s] ∼ [ʃ] alternation in the Samala 3.sbj prefix. Sometimes the harmony is merely a phonotactic restriction on the shape of morphemes (roots) within the lexicon.
Consonant harmony tends to implicate only some group (natural class) of consonants that already share a number of features, and are hence relatively similar, while ignoring less similar consonants. The distance between the potentially interacting consonants can also play a role. For example, in many cases assimilation is limited to relatively short-distance ‘transvocalic’ contexts (. . . CVC. . . ), though the interpretation of such locality restrictions remains a matter of debate. Consonants that do not directly participate in the harmony (as triggers or undergoers of assimilation) are typically neutral and transparent, allowing the assimilating property to be propagated across them. However, this is not universally true; in recent years several cases have come to light in which certain segments can act as blockers when they intervene between a potential trigger-target pair.
The main significance of consonant harmony for linguistic theory lies in its apparently non-local character and the challenges that this poses for theories of phonological representations and processes, as well as for formal models of phonological learning. Along with other types of long-distance dependencies in segmental phonology (e.g., long-distance dissimilation, and vowel harmony systems with one or more transparent vowels), sound patterns of consonant harmony have contributed to the development of many theoretical constructs, such as autosegmental (nonlinear) representations, feature geometry, underspecification, feature spreading, strict locality (vs. ‘gapped’ representations), parametrized visibility, agreement constraints, and surface correspondence relations. The formal analysis of long-distance assimilation (and dissimilation) remains a rich and vibrant area of theoretical research. The empirical base for such theoretical inquiry also continues to be expanded. On the one hand, previously undocumented cases (or new, surprising details of known cases) continue to be added to the corpus of attested consonant harmony patterns. On the other hand, artificial phonology learning experiments allow the properties of typologically rare or unattested patterns to be explored in a controlled laboratory setting.
