Phonetic Causes of Sound Change

Daniel Recasens is Full Professor of Catalan Philology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Director of the Phonetics Laboratory at the Institut d'Estudis Catalans. His research interests include the interarticulatory mechanisms in speech production, the phonetic causes of sound change, and the phonetics-phonology interface. He is currently Associate Editor of Phonetica and a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, and has served as Chair of the 15th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (2003) and as Vice-President of the International Phonetic Association (2007-2011). His books include oarticulation and Sound Change in Romance (Benjamins, 2014) and The Production of Consonant Clusters (De Gruyter, 2018) and his work has appeared in journals such as Journal of Phonetics and Phonetica and in edited volumes from OUP, Benjamins, and De Gruyter.

This monograph investigates the phonetic factors driving sound change, focusing on the palatalization and assibilation of velar stops (velar softening) and the softening of labial stops and labiodental fricatives (labial softening). The study covers Romance dialects, Slavic languages, Greek, Albanian, Romanian, and Bantu languages, offering new insights into diachronic processes. It examines how articulatory and acoustic factors shape sound changes, emphasizing how vocal tract configurations influence sound transitions.

• Series preface Preface List of figures List of abbreviations 1: Introduction 2: Velar softening 3: Velar palatalization 4: Velar assibilation 5: Labial softening 6: Conclusions References Index of language families, languages, and dialects General index