From hiatus to diphthong: the evolution of vowel sequences in Romance

Abstract

Romance languages show hiatus and diphthongal realisations of inherited iV sequences of rising sonority (e.g. ia). We study five Romance varieties with different degrees of contrast between the two realisation types: Romanian, with a diphthong-hiatus contrast, Spanish, with a weaker contrast, French, with no contrast (all diphthongs), and European and Brazilian Portuguese, with no contrast (all hiatus). We show that the different degrees of synchronic contrast are related to three independent factors : (i) a general articulatory tendency for [iV] hiatus to resolve to diphthongs, due to the relative stability of diphthongal articulations ; (ii) a structural ' attractor ' effect of pre-existing [jV] diphthongs in a language, from different historical sources ; and (iii) prosodic lengthening effects which inhibit the shift from hiatus to diphthong, supported by phonetic studies of durational patterns across the five languages.

2. Segmental phenomena and their interactions: Evidence for prosodic organization and the architecture of grammar

“…For example, in languages like Spanish and Romanian and within the word, distance relative to stress has been reported to affect the probability of V1 semivocalization in pretonic positions (Hualde 1999;Simonet 2005;Chitoran/Hualde 2007). Similarly, in Catalan word initial high vowels have been shown not to semivocalize if word stress closely follows (i.e.…”

The intricate connection between diphthongs and stress in Spanish

“…The cases in which the gliding rule does not apply are very limited in number compared to the number of items undergoing gliding and, thus, they have been considered exceptional. Additionally, most of the exceptional hiatus are not randomly distributed in the lexicon, but they have a morphological justification or tend to surface in a prosodic prominent position, namely the initial syllable of a word (for details, see Cabré & Prieto 2006, Chitoran & Hualde 2007, Colina 1995Hualde 1999Hualde , 2005Hualde & Prieto 2002, Navarro Tomás 1918/1977). On the basis of these facts, I will assume that gliding is a productive pattern in Spanish, which can be blocked under exceptional circumstances.…”

Postlexical contraction of nonhigh vowels in Spanish

“…Nevertheless, there are also instances of exceptions to the Lexical Gliding Rule without morphological justification. The distribution of exceptional hiatus in the lexicon has been the object of some recent work (see Hualde, 1999;Hualde and Prieto, 2002;Chitoran and Hualde, 2007;Hualde, 2005:81-86, Cabré and Prieto, 2004). It appears that Peninsular Spanish has more exceptions to Lexical Gliding than many Latin American varieties.…”