In Phonetic causes of sound change: the palatalization and assibilation of obstruents,

Abstract

In Phonetic causes of sound change: the palatalization and assibilation of obstruents, Daniel Recasens investigates the phonetic motivation for the ‘softening’ of velar and labial stops to (alveolo-)palatal affricates or fricatives (traditionally called ‘palatalisation’), arguing for the articulation-based nature of this sound change and for the necessity of an intermediate stage of an (alveolo-)palatal stop. The book is interesting, timely and necessary. The topic of the phonetic causes of sound change has been discussed for a long time, but it is far from being resolved. Palatalisation provides an excellent test case for the phonetic scenarios that drive the change, since it is cross-linguistically common and has a wide range of triggers and targets. In fact, it ranges so widely that there is plenty of literature covering different aspects of palatalisation in different language families. As to the bigger picture, there are several typological surveys of palatalisation patterns in the languages of the world, but not necessarily from the point of view of sound change, and definitely not exhaustive. As a typological study, the book is quite remarkable, as it covers a wide range of processes, concentrating mostly on Romance languages. Even though a wide range of typological data is covered in the book, the subtitle The palatalization and assibilation of obstruents appears to be somewhat misleading, since the book discusses only velars and labials. There is a good explanation for this choice (there is a vast amount of literature on the palatalisation of coronals), but one cannot help but dream about seeing a discussion in a single volume of all the places of articulation affected by palatalisation. Also, although it is very difficult to cite all the relevant literature in such an ambitious project, one important missing reference on the typology of the relevant sound changes is Kümmel (2007). The book emphasises the importance of distinguishing one-stage vs. multiplestage sound changes, and thus the multiple possible pathways of diachronic development. As Recasens puts it, the book ‘is especially interested in ascertaining the intermediate stages which may occur during these sound changes and also to make sense of the articulatory and perceptual factors which render them possible’ (p. 4). Another important aim of the book is to put forward an articulatory account of change which addresses both articulatory and acoustic data, as well as offering both articulatorily and acoustically based explanations.