Synchronic variation and sound change in Romance languages: a corpus-based study of lenition phenomena in Romanian and Spanish
Résumé
Many diachronic phonological changes mirror synchronic phonetic variations, and as J. Ohala
proposed, some historical processes can be âduplicatedâ in laboratory conditions through acoustic
and perceptual experiments. We compare two lenition phenomena in Romanian and Spanish
through corpus-based analyses, both of which are linked to phonological changes from Latin to
modern Romance languages.