Coarticulation and Sound Change in Romance by Daniel Recasens deals with the articulatory causes of sound change. The aim of this book is to bring together many sound changes which have taken place in Romance languages and to provide a phonetic explanation for them, based on laboratory data.
This volume is not an introductory course in phonetics or historical linguistics. It rather describes sound change from the point of view of the Degree of Articulatory Constraint theory. This is one of the very few works which actually gather together the results of several years of one author's investigation on this topic. This work is crucial for anyone interested in phonetic reasons for sound change.
Daniel Recasens is a professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the author of many production and perception studies of sound change. Together with colleagues, Daniel Recasens has been developing the model of Degree of Articulatory Constraint (DAC) over the last 20 years. The present book is a synthesis of the essential findings of these and many other studies about the articulatory reasons for sound change, with special emphasis on Romance languages.
The book consists of six chapters. The Introduction provides a detailed explanation of the DAC model. The main issue in this framework is coarticulation, i.e. the mutual influence of sounds in a speech chain. The DAC model predicts that the more complex the articulation of a consonant or vowel is (especially in the tongue dorsum), the more resistant it is to – and the greater will be its influence on – surrounding speech sounds.
The main hypothesis in this book is that many sound changes are due to the articulatory properties of sounds. Recasens states that ‘sound changes involving consecutive phonetic segments should be strongly conditioned by the articulatory and coarticulatory characteristics for the triggering vowels and consonants’ (p. 14). In the following chapters, the author outlines the articulatory characteristics of sounds and explains sound changes from the phonetic point of view. He also provides numerous examples from Romance languages and linguistic families, along with the data from a Catalan database.
Three main Chapters treat the influence of consonants on neighbouring vowels (Chapter 2), of vowels on consonants and on other vowels (Chapter 3) and of consonants on other consonants (Chapter 4). Each chapter presents how and to which degree the sounds influence neighbouring sounds, based on their articulatory properties. The sound changes under investigation are segmental insertion or elision, assimilation and dissimilation, which are assumed to be the processes which can be explained by investigating coarticulation.
Chapter 2 analyses the influence of consonants on enclosing vocalic segments. First, it provides the articulatory description of the sounds under investigation. Recasens divides consonants into several groups according to the degree of coarticulatory resistance or aggressiveness. For instance, the author claims that liquids /r/ and dark /l/ are highly constrained. As a consequence, these consonants should cause more sound changes involving vowels than, for example, labial plosives. Recasens supports his hypothesis with numerous cases from the literature.
Chapter 3 investigates how vowels affect neighbouring consonants and other vowels. The author states that, similar to consonants, vowels can present different degrees of coarticulatory resistance. For instance, high front vowels would be more resistant and aggressive than low vowels. In Chapter 4, the author presents the analysis of how consonants affect other consonants and clusters. Recasens considers consonants in different word positions. He also analyses the importance of place or manner of articulation for sound change, for instance, how voicing or nasality affect target consonants.
Chapter 5 provides a general discussion of the most important findings in the book. Unsurprisingly, Recasens comes to the conclusion that there is a relationship between the articulatory properties of a sound and the sound change which this sound is involved in. He argues that the direction of the coarticulatory influence is quite important: some sounds exert mainly progressive influence (e.g. alveolopalatals), while sounds like /r/ exert both progressive and regressive influence. The book ends with a Chapter 6, summarising results and presenting an outlook for further studies.
This book is aimed at phoneticians and also the general reader already acquainted with phonetic terms. Although the author gives detailed descriptions of articulatory and acoustic properties of sounds, some knowledge of phonetics is called for.
The volume is an excellent overview of what Recasens has been investigating during his long scientific carrier. The author has done an enormous amount of work to bring together abundant examples from many descriptive studies of Romance and other languages. He also uses a Catalan database to provide more empirical data. This book was of a great help for my thesis on sound change because I could transfer the knowledge and apply the findings to another language family.
This volume can be used as a reference book, where the reader can look for a certain sound change or a particular sound. Sometimes it takes more time to find the appropriate information, however. For instance, if one is interested in rhotics in general, one has to look in all three main chapters in order to see how they influence vowels or consonants (Chapter 2 and 4), or how they are affected by other sounds (Chapter 3 and 4).
There are some minor comments to add. It is not clear why the consonant-dependent processes are presented in two parts (Chapters 2 and 4), while vowel-dependent processes are put together in one chapter. It is probably due to the greater amount of material about consonants than vowels. Besides, Chapters 3 and 4 end with a summary, while Chapter 2 does not.
It should be borne in mind that the sound changes treated here are those which result from coarticulation. As a result, sound changes like analogy or contrast neutralisation are excluded from the study because they cannot be accounted for by the DAC model.
Another point to be mentioned is that this book does not provide many references on previous empirical work. This is probably one of the unavoidable outcomes of a study which was planned to be a compilation of previous work. Thus, this book provides an overview on coarticulation and sound change, and it would have been too much to incorporate references for each empirical study.
I recommend this book to everybody who wants to understand the causes and mechanisms behind sound change.
