André Zampaulo (2019). Palatal sound change in the Romance languages: diachronic and synchronic perspectives. (Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics 38.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. xii + 229.

Zampaulo’s monograph aims to accomplish a daunting task: to connect the historical pathways that resulted in various palatal outcomes in Romance to current palatal synchronic variation in this language family, and to provide a phonetically grounded formal analysis for both. The volume is organised into seven chapters. The first three provide a general introduction to the volume, the theoretical framework employed for the analysis and the main articulatory and acoustic properties of palatal consonants. The next three chapters comprise the core of the investigation. Chapter 4 focuses on the historical development of palatals in Romance, while Chapter 5 examines the current dialectal variation of palatals in this language family. Chapter 6 presents a formal account of diachronic and synchronic palatal variation in this family, and Chapter 7 offers some concluding remarks.