ABSTRACT
The emergence of palatal consonants in the history of the Romance languages represents a phonological innovation, since Latin displayed only labial, dento-alveolar, and velar consonants. Because of their variability, complexity, and, in many respects, unique diachronic paths, Spanish palatals constitute a challenging case study worth the attention of Romance and general linguists alike. This chapter reviews the origins of such segments and presents a formal account that builds on the insights of previous proposals. Specifically, it provides a constraint-based analysis that focuses on the initiation of a change event during the interaction between a speaker and a listener-turned-speaker in spoken communication. A sound change is formalized as the difference in constraint ranking between the faithful realization of the speaker’s input and the listener-turned-speaker’s reanalysis (as input) of one of the unfaithful realizations to the original speaker’s input. The word ‘palatal’ in the present analysis is used as a cover term for a range of sounds whose passive place of articulation includes not only the palate itself but also the postalveolar region. As such, the emergence of sonorants [ʎ, ɲ] and obstruents [ɟ, ʝ, ʒ, ʃ, tʃ] in the history of Spanish is discussed.
