Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Distancing As A Casual Factor In The Development Of /0/ And /X/ In Spanish, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

The evolution of the Spanish sibilant system has been an object of study since the late nineteenth century. Since that time, a myriad of books and articles have been published on the subject whose major focus has been to determine the exact nature of the sibilant changes and the chronology of each change. As is the case in most historical work, the question of why phonological systems evolve usually takes on only secondary importance. Among those theories proposed in order to explain why phonetic changes occur is the functionalist idea that there needs to be an optimal acoustic distance between …