Manual of Romance Phonetics and Phonology

Christoph Gabriel, Mainz Univ., Germany; Randall Gess, Carleton Univ., Canada; Trudel Meisenburg, Osnabrück Univ., Germany.

This handbook is structured in two parts: it provides, on the one hand, a comprehensive (synchronic) overview of the phonetics and phonology (including prosody) of a breadth of Romance languages and focuses, on the other hand, on central topics of research in Romance segmental and suprasegmental phonology, including comparative and diachronic perspectives.

Phonetics and phonology have always been a core discipline in Romance linguistics: the wide synchronic variety of languages and dialects derived from spoken Latin is extensively explored in numerous corpus and atlas projects, and for quite a few of these varieties there is also more or less ample documentation of at least some of their diachronic stages. This rich empirical database offers excellent testing grounds for different theoretical approaches and allows for substantial insights into phonological structuring as well as into (incipient, ongoing, or concluded) processes of phonological change.

The volume can be read both as a state-of-the-art report of research in the field and as a manual of Romance languages with special emphasis on the key topics of phonetics and phonology.

La collection Manuals of Romance Linguistics (MRL) a l ambition de présenter un panorama d ensemble de la linguistique romane tenant compte des derniers acquis de la recherche. Elle comprendra une soixantaine de volumes qui pourront être utilisés séparément tout en offrant dans leur totalité une bonne approche globale de l éventail actuel de la linguistique romane. L accent sera mis en particulier sur les linguae minores.