Publisher's Synopsis
This book provides a complete, comparative, nongallocentric account of nasality in all the Romance languages. It demonstrates the central role of nasality in the history of sound changes in the languages of southern Europe. In doing so, it assembles a large amount of important philological and linguistic data previously dispersed and difficult to access, and organizes it in a way that allows the author (and will allow the reader) to analyse it systematically. Two introductory chapters discuss general principles of nasality and Romance nasalization. Subsequent chapters are then devoted to each language. The author considers all the standard varieties and a substantial range of non-standard varieties, and identifies broad characteristics of vowel nasalization in Romance. In the the final chapter he makes a clear bridge between the data-rich discussion of individual languages and the isolation of language universals. This is will be the standard work in its field for many years. It will be of central interest to linguists and philologists of Romance, as well as to those concerned more generally to understand the causes, patterns, and processes of sound change.
