Author: Viola Guilia Miglio, University of California, Santa Barbara
Hardback: ISBN: 0415967805 Pages: 176 Price: U.S. $ 65.00
Abstract:
This book investigates various phenomena affecting both stressed and
unstressed vowels in Romance languages. Viola Miglio traces vowel
changes within this language family, such as those that occurred
during the Great Vowel Shift. Using examples from Catalan, Mantuan,
and Portuguese, this book analyzes vowel reduction, including
"neutralization," which involves a change of vowel quality in
stressless syllables that favors vowel qualities that are maximally
distinguishable from one another. This analysis provides
classifications of vowel reduction phenomena through the interaction
of markedness constraints, markedness cooccurrence constraints, and
faithfulness and positional faithfulness constraints.
Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics
Phonology
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