This volume contains 17 studies on historical Romance linguistics within a variety of current theoretical frameworks; it includes studies on phonology, morphology and syntax, focusing solely or comparatively on all five 'major' Romance languages: French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish. An introduction by the eminent Romance Linguist Jürgen Klausenburger addresses the fit of these studies in the overall development of the field of historical Romance linguistics since the 19th century. The studies in this volume demonstrate an organic link between Malkiel's (1961) 'classic' definition of Romance linguistics and the field of Romance linguistics today, because just as scholars of the field in the 19th century successfully applied the dominant paradigm of (historical) linguistics of their time, Neogrammarian theory, so do the authors contained in the present volume avail themselves of current linguistic advances to achieve equally significant results.

Table of contents

Foreword Randall S. Gess and Deborah Arteaga vii

Introduction: From Romance Philology to (Historical) Romance Linguistics? Jurgen Klausenburger 1

Part I: Phonology

Systemic Contrast and the Diachrony of Spanish Sibilant Voicing Travis G. Bradley and Ann Marie Delforge 19

The Myth of Phonologically Distinctive Vowel Length in Renaissance French Randall S. Gess 53

Glide Strengthening in French and Spanish and the Formal Representation of Affricates Haike Jacobs and Robbie van Gerwen 77

Rhythm and Prosodic Change Michael L. Mazzola 97

Contrast Preservation Theory and Historical Change Jean-Pierre Y. Montreuil 111

On the Phonetics of Rhymes in Classical and Pre-Classical French: A Sociolinguistic Perspective Yves-Charles Morin 131

Is the ‘Word’ Still a Phonological Unit in French? Evidence from Verlan Douglas C. Walker 163

Part II: Morphology

Proclisis and Enclisis of Object Pronouns at the Turn of the 17th Century: The Speech of the Future Louis XIIIth Paul Hirschbühler and Marie Labelle 187

The Emergence of Marked Structures in the Integration of Loans in Italian Lori Repetti 209

On the Life and (Near) Death of a Morphophoneme Margaret E. Winters 237

German Influence in Romanian Wiecher Zwanenburg 253

Part III: Syntax Il Était une Fois: Diachronic Development of Expletives, Case, and Agreement from Latin to Modern French Deborah Arteaga and Julia Herschensohn 269–286

'Synthetic' vs. 'Analytic' in Romance: The Importance of Varieties Brigitte L.M. Bauer 287–304

Intra-System Variability and Change in Nominal and Verbal Morphology Barbara E. Bullock and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio 305–325

Aspects of Infinitival Constructions in the History of Portuguese Ana Maria Martins 327–355

Morphosyntactic Functions of Italian Reflexive si: A Grammaticalization Analysis Cinzia Russi 357–374

From Adverb to Discourse Marker and Beyond: The Status of là in Franco-American French Jane S. Smith 375–387 General Index 389–393