1 Length and weight in Romance

Abstract

In this chapter we consider the phonological status and patterning of vowel and consonant length and syllabic quantity across Romance varieties. The chapter is divided into two parts. In the first section, we provide an overview of the status of vowel and consonant length in the modern Romance varieties and describe the diachronic context. Synchronically, the presence of a phonemic contrast between short and long vowels is characteristic particularly of Gallo-Romance (including the varieties of northern Italy and Alpine Romance); some kind of distinction between short and long vowels and/or consonants (not necessarily one with phonemic significance) is found in a broader range of varieties, primarily in Italy. Diachronic traces of length, however, are found across most Romance languages. The second section takes up the question of phonological weight and shows that weight-sensitive patterns, primarily relating to the placement of stress, minimality requirements, and prosodic morphology, are pervasive throughout the family, even in languages without phonological length distinctions.

The prosodization of derived words in Brazilian Portuguese: Joining perspectives

“…The idea that Portuguese is not subject to the minimal word requirement, proposed by Bisol (2000) and Vigário (2003), among others, contradicts the hypothesis defended by McCarthy and Prince (1995), according to which feet are binary under moraic or syllabic analysis in the world's languages (in other terms, words must contain at least one heavy syllable or two syllables). Given the scarcity of ω's with the CV structure, Iosad and Wetzels (2021), in their turn, suggest that the word in BP is at least bimoraic or has the structure C 0 V.C 0 V or C 0 VC. Treating monosyllables consisting of light syllables in BP as exceptional, however, is far from being consensual, especially because they are items, including nouns, inflected verbs and functional words, which are highly frequent in the language.…”