Parallel Weakening Of (s) And Compensatory Change In Italian, French, And Spanish (romance, Effort, Phonology, Morphology, Dialectalization).

Abstract

The weakening of s , a sound change underway in the majority of Modern Spanish dialects, was carried through in earlier stages of Italian and French. In all three languages, in view of the morphological status of s --that of a nominal marker (of number and case or of number alone) and a verbal marker (of second person singular in most verb tenses)--its weakening affected not only the phonology of each language, but also the morphology. The goal of this dissertation is to assess the role of least effort in the phonological weakening of s and the morphological restructuring in its wake. In Chapter I reduction of effort is defined for phonology as a reduction in articulator movement, resulting from assimilation or suppression of sounds, and for morphology as a reduction in redundant signaling which does not impair communication. In Chapter II the six altered reflexes of original s --aspiration, vocalization, modification of the vowel preceding s (lengthening, raising, or lowering), gemination, fusion, and deletion--are documented according to phonological environment for each diasystem as evidence that the weakening of s results in reduced articulatory effort. In Chapter III the morphological consequences of the weakening of s are examined in Italian and French. Since in Italian suffixed vocalic alternation replaced s as a number- and person-marker, redundancy remained essentially unchanged. In French the loss of the redundant plural marker s clearly reduced effort in the noun phrase. Person marking, on the other hand, became more redundant with the rise of obligatory subject pronouns. In Chapter IV it is observed that the weakening of s in Spanish leads to two primary systems of number and person marking: suffixed vocalic alternation resulting when the weakening of s modifies the quality of the preceding vowel, as in Italian, and preposed markers resulting when s is deleted, as in French. The phonological evolution of s , which formerly played a significant role in the division of the Romania into East and West, is now furthering the dialectal fragmentation of Spanish. Only time will tell whether the weakening of s in Spanish will have consequences as profound as those which occurred in Latin.