1 Overview of the volume

Zampaulo's monograph aims to accomplish a daunting task: to connect the historical pathways that resulted in various palatal outcomes in Romance to current palatal synchronic variation in this language family, and to provide a phonetically grounded formal analysis for both. The volume is organised into seven chapters. The first three provide a general introduction to the volume, the theoretical framework employed for the analysis and the main articulatory and acoustic properties of palatal consonants. The next three chapters comprise the core of the investigation. Chapter 4 focuses on the historical development of palatals in Romance, while Chapter 5 examines the current dialectal variation of palatals in this language family. Chapter 6 presents a formal account of diachronic and synchronic palatal variation in this family, and Chapter 7 offers some concluding remarks.

2 Introductory chapters

The brief introductory chapter defines ‘palatal’ sounds as those that arose historically from palatalisation. Following Romance linguistics tradition, these might result either in palatal articulations or in changes in manner, most typically involving affrication. Thus the book is set to discuss not just palatals, but also alveolars, palato-alveolars and retroflex consonants. This chapter also outlines the Romance languages and dialects that are the main focus of investigation: Eastern Romance, Rhaeto-Romance, Italo-Romance, Sardinian, Gallo-Romance and Ibero-Romance.

The second chapter provides detailed information about the theoretical framework for the study. Zampaulo focuses on the origin of a given sound change at the level of the individual, before this change spreads throughout a speech community (Hale Reference Hale, Joseph and Janda2003, Croft Reference Croft2010). Zampaulo emphasises the role of both the speaker and the listener in sound change, following Ohala (Reference Ohala, Masek, Hendrick and Miller1981, Reference Ohala and Jones1993) and later work. Sound change originates from a mismatch in speech between the speaker and the listener, usually when ambiguity is present, either because the former pronounces an innovative sound that the listener then adopts (hypocorrection) or because the listener reinterprets innovatively a sound pronounced by the speaker (hypercorrection). Sound change implies a difference between the grammars of the speaker and listener; this can be modelled formally through constraint interaction in Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky Reference Prince and Smolensky2004). Since phonetics is critical in the inception of sound change, Zampaulo considers that constraints are phonetically grounded (Hayes & Steriade Reference Hayes and Steriade2004).

Chapter 3 reviews the main articulatory and acoustic characteristics of palatal sounds in Romance. Their articulatory complexity, involving both tongue blade and dorsum as well as a large articulatory contact area, plays a role in much of their variation and change. True palatals, [c ç ɟ ʝ j cç ɟʝ] and also [i e ɛ], are distinguished from alveopalatal [ʎ ɲ], since articulatory evidence suggests that the latter may involve contact with the alveolar ridge (see for example Recasens Reference Recasens2013). The chapter also discusses the articulation of palato-alveolar [ʃ ʒ] in several varieties of Romance, alveopalatal [ɕ ʑ] in Occitan and a few dialects of southern Italy, and alveolar, postalveolar and retroflex affricates. This chapter includes representative electropalatograms, spectrograms and x-ray tracings illustrating articulatory and acoustic differences among palatals and non-palatals, mainly for Spanish, although, unfortunately, the interpretation of these instrumental images is not explained in great detail.

3 Main analysis

Chapter 4 provides an account of the development of palatals from Latin to Romance, taking into consideration orthographic evidence from historical documents as well as comparative phonetic reconstruction. Latin lacked palatal consonants, but the palatal glide [j] (the ‘yod’) emerged in several phonological contexts; most crucially, in vowel sequences comprising unstressed vowels i and e adjacent to another vowel. These hiatus sequences reduced to diphthongs, and i and e became [j] in this context.Footnote ¹ Examples include Latin cunea ‘wedge’ and apiu ‘celery’, which resulted in *cun[j]a and *ap[j]u in Proto-Romance (p. 47). The emergence of yod is a key development in the phonological evolution of Romance languages, since its interaction with adjacent consonants results in many palatalisation outcomes.

Most of this chapter discusses the development and evolution of the palatal lateral [ʎ] in Romance. Zampaulo distinguishes two different stages: an early occurrence in Proto-Romance (indicated as [ʎ]₁), affecting all Romance languages; and a later development ([ʎ]₂), which is limited to Ibero-Romance. The first stage developed from two different sources, the first being the palatalisation of [l] before yod, as in *mu[lj]ere ‘woman, wife’, resulting in moi[ʎ]er in Old French, mu[ʎ]er in Aragonese, Catalan and Portuguese, and mo[ʎʎ]e in Italian, for example (p. 50). [ʎ] delateralised in several languages, becoming [j] or deleting – the latter result was particularly common after a palatal vowel. However, in some cases [ʎ] strengthened to a fricative or an affricate, as in mu[ʒ]er in Old Spanish and mu[ʣ]ere in the Sardinian dialects of Logudorese and Nuorese.

The second source for the development of [ʎ]₁ was the deletion of the posttonic vowel in Latin -cul-, -tul- and -gul-. The first two evolved to [k.l] (oculus > *o[k.l]u ‘eye’; p. 58), and the latter to [g.l] in Proto-Romance (regula > *re[g.l]a ‘ploughshare’; p. 51). In Ibero- and Gallo-Romance, [k.l] and [g.l] resulted in [ʎ], which eventually depalatalised or deleted. Zampaulo reviews three different accounts proposed in the literature to explain this change: (i) weakening and fronting of the velar consonant to [j], which eventually palatalised the following [l] (Menéndez Pidal Reference Menéndez Pidal1950, Penny Reference Penny2002), (ii) metathesis of [j] and [l], followed by palatalisation (Rini Reference Rini, Harris-Northall and Cravens1991), and (iii) palatalisation of [l], resulting in *[k.ʎ g.ʎ] with subsequent lenition and then deletion of the velar (Wireback Reference Wireback1997). Zampaulo argues that the first account is the simplest and most direct, and proposes the evolutionary pathway for Ibero- and Gallo-Romance oculus > *o[k.l]u > *o[ɣ.l]o > *o[j.l]o > *o[j.lʲ]o > o[ʎ]o ‘eye’. Zampaulo's argumentation is sound and reasonably easy to follow, but it is not completely consistent with the formal analysis proposed for the emergence of this second diachronic source of [ʎ]₁ in Chapter 6, which assumes metathesis between the palatal glide and the following alveolar lateral (p. 161).

The second development of the palatal lateral ([ʎ₂]), which is limited to Ibero-Romance, is related to the evolution of the word-initial clusters [pl- kl- fl-] and the intervocalic geminate lateral [lː]. In Spanish and Asturian, the obstruent in [pl- kl- fl-] weakened and then deleted. Zampaulo connects the pervasiveness of obstruent lenition in Ibero-Romance to the loss of the obstruent in these clusters. In other Romance languages, obstruent weakening and deletion is not so common, and, as a result, these sequences followed different evolutionary paths. Zampaulo also addresses the emergence of the palatal nasal, attested in all Romance languages except Romanian (where it denasalised to [j] or deleted), and reviews the development of palatal obstruents from several sources. The chapter finishes with a hypothesised reconstruction of the main evolutionary patterns of palatals, which serves as a background for the theoretical analysis in Chapter 6. It would have been useful to include a definition or brief explanation of what is understood precisely by the term Proto-Romance, since not all scholars agree on the exact meaning of this term (Penny Reference Penny2002: 6). In addition, some readers will miss having full translations of quotations from languages other than English in this chapter (for example, from French on pages 50, 77 and from Spanish on pages 58, 60, 61). Finally, Zampaulo states that in most dialects of Spanish, <gl> is pronounced differently word-initially and between vowels. This point should be elaborated on or clarified further, since <b d g> in this language tend to be pronounced as approximants/spirants regardless of word position, unless they follow a nasal or a pause (or <d> in the case of [l]), when they tend to be realised as stops (see for example Hualde Reference Hualde2014, Martínez-Gil Reference Martínez-Gil, Colina and Martínez-Gil2020).

In Chapter 5, Zampaulo presents a dialectal overview of palatal phenomena in Romance. The chapter first considers the delateralisation of the palatal lateral ([ʎ₂]) in the transition from Medieval to Modern Spanish, by which it merged with other palatal obstruents. This merger (‘yeísmo’) is considered to have been caused by the perceptual, articulatory and acoustic similarities between the palatal fricative and the palatal lateral. Zampaulo then considers the distribution of palatals in Spain and Latin America. Yeísmo is pervasive in most of Spain, except in the Basque country and some areas of Catalonia and Valencia, where bilingual speakers maintain a distinction between the two phonemes. Likewise, yeísmo is widespread in Latin America, but ‘ieísmo’, ‘ʃeísmo’ and ‘ʒeísmo’ – the pronunciation of <ll> and <y> as [j], [ʃ] and [ʒ] respectively – are also attested; ieísmo mostly in Central American Spanish, and ʃeísmo and ʒeísmo in Argentina and Uruguay. This chapter also presents the results of experimental research on the Argentinian variety Santiago del Estero Spanish, where <y> reportedly corresponds to [j] or [ʝ], while <ll> is pronounced as [ʒ] (p. 126). Results show that the [ʒ] is the most common realisation, regardless of orthography. Only the words yo ‘I’ and ya ‘already’ tend to be realised with palatal approximants, particularly in the speech of older speakers, thus supporting Lipski's (Reference Lipski1994) and Colantoni & Hualde's (Reference Colantoni, Hualde, Colantoni and Louro2013) position that a change in progress to palato-alveolars is almost complete in this variety. The chapter also includes a brief section covering palatals in Equatorial Guinea, the Philippines and varieties of Judeo-Spanish, as well as a short section on the distribution of palatal consonants in Portuguese, French, Italian, Sardinian, Rhaeto-Romance and Eastern Romance varieties. The discussion of palatal variation in Ibero-Romance, particularly in Spanish, is truly comprehensive, but additional discussion of palatals in other Romance varieties would have provided an ideal balance.

Chapter 6 provides a unitary account of palatalisation phenomena in OT. As previewed in Chapter 2, the difference in the constraint rankings in the grammar of the speaker and that of the listener-turned-speaker leads to sound change. Elaborating on Jun (Reference Jun2004), Zampaulo formalises palatalisation as the conflict between the two phonetically grounded constraint families Weakening (Weak), which captures the drive to minimise articulatory effort, and Preserve (Pres), which enforces perceptual cue preservation. Both are gradient, capturing various degrees of gestural weakening and cue preservation. Pres constraints can refer to various cues, including specific places and manners of articulations (Pres_alveolar, Pres_palatal, …). Weak constraints can be specific to syllabic positions such as onset, coda or complex onset.

Zampaulo's proposed analysis is applied to the main diachronic changes concerning palatals covered in Chapter 4, beginning with the development of the early palatal lateral in Proto-Romance ([ʎ]₁) from the sequence [lj] (rather than with the emergence of yod). The faithful realisation of the speaker's input ([lj]) is captured by the ranking of Pres above Weak (specifically Pres_palatal, Pres_alveolar ⪢ Weak_alveolar, Weak_palatal; pp. 158–159). The emergence of [ʎ] as optimal in the listener's grammar is considered to involve regressive place assimilation, and therefore partial weakening of [l]. This is captured by reranking Weak_alveolar between Pres_palatal and Pres_alveolar.

Although the proposed analysis accounts for both the faithful [lj] sequence and its unfaithful reinterpretation as [ʎ], it is not clear that alveolar weakening is the main catalyst for the [lj] > [ʎ]₁ diachronic change. The sequence [lj], as noted in Chapter 4, arises diachronically from the development of yod from unstressed i, e in vowel sequences. Further gestural reduction or absorption of [j] to the preceding consonant is plausible, particularly since this would result in the simplification of complex nuclei (González Reference González, Côté and Mathieu2014). Additionally, as noted in Chapter 3 (p. 34), there is articulatory evidence that [ʎ] is alveopalatal. Thus its gestural composition plausibly overlaps or blends the tongue-tip gesture of [l] and the tongue-body gesture of [j]. This is the approach taken by Baker (Reference Baker2004), who proposes the constraint Condense, enforcing the compression of articulatory features in speech, to account for the merging of the alveolar and palatal gestures in this and similar cases.

Chapter 7 offers some brief final remarks summarising the goals and contents of the book. It also indicates a few avenues for further investigation, including obtaining acoustically informed data on palatal variation in Spanish and other Romance languages to test some of the intermediate diachronic changes proposed in the volume, and a more in-depth examination of the nature of the Weakening and Preserve constraints.

4 General evaluation

The main contribution of Zampaulo's book is to provide a common phonological analysis for the historical changes of palatals in Romance and their current synchronic variation, grounded in palatal articulation and perception, and taking into consideration speaker–listener interaction. Since the tableaux in Chapter 6 include gestural information, a review, even if brief, of Articulatory Phonology (e.g. Browman & Goldstein 1989) would have been welcome in Chapter 2 or at the beginning of Chapter 6. The motivation of some constraints invoked in the analysis, such as Weak_{complex onset, Vo1celess Obst+L} (p. 165) and Weak_{Cʎ-,obstruent} (p. 167), could have been explained in more detail. In addition, there are a few points in the analysis that are not completely consistent with the information provided in earlier chapters. These include, as has been noted above, classifying [ʎ] as alveopalatal from a phonetic point of view but treating it as a palatal in the phonological analysis, and the inconsistency in the intermediate stages proposed for the change [-k.l- -g.l-] > [ʎ], assumed to involve metathesis in Chapter 6, but not in Chapter 4.

Chapter 6 would also have benefited from a detailed comparison of alternative accounts of palatalisation phenomena in Romance and/or Spanish, including previous OT accounts such as Holt (Reference Holt1997), Baker (Reference Baker2004) and González (Reference González, Côté and Mathieu2014). Other approaches to palatalisation from a cross-linguistic perspective could also have been acknowledged, particularly Bateman (Reference Bateman2007), which proposes a gesture-based OT approach that emphasises the articulatory underpinnings of palatalisation. Zampaulo does briefly refer to Baker's approach (pp. 162, 164), but a more explicit comparison to this account, which models diachronic palatalisation in Spanish as the interaction of Identity, which militates against input/output changes, Lazy, which encodes the drive towards minimising articulatory effort (Kirchner Reference Kirchner1998), and Condense, which compresses articulatory features in the speech change, would be warranted, particularly since Baker's approach, unlike Zampaulo's, is based on categorical constraints (even for Lazy, which was originally proposed as a gradient constraint; Kirchner Reference Kirchner1998).

Zampaulo's monograph is a much needed volume on diachronic and synchronic palatalisation in Romance. It boasts a truly impressive range of coverage, particularly from a diachronic perspective. Its phonetically grounded analysis is innovative, and provides new avenues for the exploration of the complexity underlying palatalisation. This volume will be of special interest for researchers and students focusing on historical Romance linguistics, Spanish dialectology and phonological theory, particularly those interested in palatalisation and, more generally, place assimilation.