The voicing of intervocalic stops in Old Tuscan and probabilistic sound change

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.

Variable Phonological Rules and ‘Quantal' Perception as a Source of Probabilistic Sound Change: The Case of Intervocalic Voicing in Old Tuscan

“…The form (and hence the postconsonantal vowel) taken into account in the word list was the singular for nouns, the singular masculine for adjectives, and the infinitive for verbs (for the morphological justification for these choices, see Canalis, 2014). The data confirm that also open postconsonantal vowels (and rhotics) are positively correlated with voicing (table 7).…”

“…It is a freely accessible online corpus of texts of medieval Italian dialects, 1,250 of which are Tuscan (as of June 2013 -the corpus is still growing). A subcorpus of 408 texts was selected (the bulk of it being represented by legal and commercial documents, chronicles, letters, and statutes of communes and corporations) in order to focus on non-literary texts (further details Irregular Sound Change in Old Tuscan about the criteria adopted for the creation of the subcorpus can be found in Canalis, 2014). The list of texts used is available at http://paduaresearch.cab.unipd.it/8746/1/ ListOfTexts.rtf.…”

“…Fourth, clearly non-native words (learned words of Latin origin, whose inclusion would cause an overestimation of voicelessness preservation, and indisputable Western Romance loanwords) were also removed from the list. Uncertain cases were preserved, but labelled as such in the list (for further details about the criteria adopted to identify learned words and Latinisms, see Canalis, 2014). In what follows, results only refer to the restricted list of more reliable words, but they do not change dramatically if dubious words are included as well.…”

Locality domains on Lenition. Spirantization (Gorgia) and Voicing in Tuscan dialects1

“…This tendency was also recently quantitatively confirmed by Canalis (2014), who calculated in Medieval Tuscan 25.8 percent of intervocalic Voicing when the stop is preceded by /a/, but only 11.5% of Voicing when the stop is preceded by a high vowel 80 .…”

“…However, in the Italian domain, the treatment of the voiceless intervocalic Latin stops does not always correspond to the distribution identified by Wartburg (1980), especially for Tuscany: it is not the case that South of La Spezia-Rimini line the voiceless consonants have always been maintained (Clark 2003;Meyer-Lübke § 205;Giannelli and Cravens 1997;Giannelli , 1978Giannelli , 1988Russo 2014;Canalis 2014). The emerging situation is much more complicated.…”