On the partially divergent phonology
of Spanish, Portuguese and points in between
In this chapter we explore the comparative markedness and phonotactics of Spanish and Portuguese phonology as a framework in which to consider: (i) the segmental inventories of each language, (ii) the phonological processes of the grammar of each language (including how prosody may impact these), as well as (iii) certain historical and dialectal developments, including (iv) phonologically intermediate/hybrid variants.
References (115)
References
Albano, E.C. (2001). O Gesto e suas Bordas: Esboço de fonologia acústico-articulatoria do portugués brasileiro. Campinas, Brazil: Mercado de Letras.
Alves, M.M. (1999). As vogais médias em posição tônica nos nomes do português brasileiro. M.A. Dissertation. Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte.
Amaral, A. (1955). O dialecto caipira. AnhembiAnhembi, São Paulo: Anhembi.
Amastae, J. (1995). Variable spirantization: Constraint weighting in three dialects. Hispanic Linguistics, 6(7), 265–285.
Azevedo, M.M. (1981). A Contrastive Phonology of Portuguese and English. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.
Azevedo, M.M. (1984). Loss of agreement in Caipira Portuguese. Hispania, 67(3), 403–409.
Baker, G.K. (2003). Sibilant dissimilation and dispersion in the history of Spanish.
Paper presented at the Linguistics Symposium on Romance Languages 33
, Bloomington, IN.
Barbosa, P.A., & Albano, E. C. (2004). Brazilian Portuguese. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 34(2), 227–232.
Bayo Julve, J.C. (1998). La teoría del verso desde el punto de vista lingüístico (El sistema de versificación del Cantar de Mio Cid). Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Barcelona.
Bisol, L. (1989). Vowel harmony: A variable rule in Brazilian Portuguese. Language Variation and Change, 1, 185–198.
Bortoni-Ricardo, S.M. (1985). The urbanization of rural dialect speakers: A sociolinguistic study in Brazil. Cambridge: CUP.
Bouzouita, M. (2011). Future constructions in Medieval Spanish: Mesoclisis uncovered. In R. Kempson, E. Gregoromichelaki, & C. Howes (Eds.), The dynamics of lexical interfaces (pp. 91–132). Stanford, CA: CSLI.
Bradley, T.G. (Forthcoming). Róticas: Descripción fonética. In J. Gil & J. Llisterri (Eds.), Fonética y fonología descriptivas de la lengua española. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.
Brandão de Carvalho, J. (1988). Nasalité et structure syllabique en portugais et en galicien: Approche non linéare et panchronique d’un problème phonologique. Verba, 15, 237–263.
Cagliari, L.C. (1997). Fonologia do português: Análise pela geometria de traços. Campinas: Edição do Autor.
Callou, D. & Leite, Y. (1990). Iniciação à fonética e à fonologia. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar.
Carvalho, A.M. (2006). Nominal number marking in a variety of Spanish in contact with Portuguese. In T. Face & C. Klee (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the 8th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, (154–166). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Castro, I. (2004). Introdução à história do português. Geografia da língua portuguesa antiga. Lisboa: Colibri.
Cintra, L.F.L. (1995). Estudos de dialectologia portuguesa. Lisboa: Sáda Costa.
Clements, G.N. (1990). The role of the sonority cycle in core syllabification. Papers in Laboratory Phonology, 1, 283–333.
Clements, J.C., Amaral, P., & Luís, A.R. (2011). Spanish in contact with Portuguese: The case of Barranquenho. In M. Díaz-Campos (Ed.), The handbook of Hispanic sociolinguistics (pp. 395–417). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Colina, S. (2009). Spanish phonology: A syllabic perspective. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Colina, S. (2011). Plural formation in Galician. In J. Herschensohn (Ed.), Selected proceedings from the 40th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (pp. 79–98). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Colman, F. (1983). ‘Vocalisation’ as nucleation. Studia Lingüística, 37, 30–48.
Corrêa, L., Augusto, M., & Ferrari Neto, J. (2005). The early processing of number agreement in the DP: Evidence from the acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese. In D. Bamman, T. Magnitskaia, & C. Zaller (Eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Retrieved from the online proceedings supplement at <[URL] [URL]
Cristófaro, S.T. (2007). Fonética e fonologia do português (9th ed.). São Paulo: Editora Contexto.
Duffell, M.J. (1999). The metric cleansing of Hispanic verse. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 76, 151–168.
Elsman, M.M., & Holt, D.E. (2009). When small words collide: Morphological reduction and phonological compensation in Old Leonese contractions. In R. Leow, H. Campos, & D. Lardiere (Eds.), Little words: Their history, phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and acquisition, (21–33). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Espírito-Santo, F. (2010). Spirantization occurrences in German and Portuguese. Máthesis, 19, 19–33.
Ferrari Neto, J. (2003). Reconhecimento do número gramatical e processamento da concordância de número no sintagma determinante na aquisição do Português Brasileiro. M. A. Dissertation. Pontifícia Universidade Católica, Rio de Janeiro, RJ.
Ferreira, F. (2001). Variation in Ibero-Romance: A study of /s/ reduction in Brazilian Portuguese in comparison with Caribbean Spanish. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.
Ferreira, L. (2008). High initial tones and plateaux in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese neutral declaratives: Consequences to the relevance of F0, duration and vowel quality as stress correlates. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL.
Ferreira, L. (2011). Peaks and plateaux: different F0 patterns representing the same category. Revista Lingüística, 7(1), 17–34.
Ferreira, L., & Pérez-Leroux, A.T. (Forthcoming). Interpreting subject agreement: Data from Brazilian Portuguese. Lingua.
Fradejas Rueda, J.M. (2000). Fonología histórica del español. Madrid: Visor Libros.
Frota, S. (2003). The phonological status of initial high peaks in European Portuguese. Catalan Journal of linguistics, 2, 133–52.
Frota, S., & Vigário, M. (2000). Aspectos de prosódia comparada: Ritmo e entoção no PE e no BP. In R.V. Castro & P. Barbosa (Eds.), Actas do XV encontro da associação portuguesa de linguística (pp. 533–555). Braga: APL.
Galves, Charlotte. (n.d.). Clitic-placement in the history of Portuguese and the syntax-phonology interface. Retrieved from [URL]
Galves, A., & Galves, C. (1995). A case study of prosody driven language change: From Classical to Modern European Portuguese. Retrieved from [URL]
Galves, C., Paixão de Sousa, M.C., & Britto, H. (2005). The change in clitic placement from Classical to Modern European Portuguese: Results from the Tycho Brahe corpus. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 4(1), 39–67.
Holt, D.E. (1997). The role of the listener in the historical phonology of Spanish and Portuguese: An optimality-theoretic account. PhD Dissertation. Georgetown University. Retrieved from the Rutgers Optimality Archive. [URL]
Holt, D.E. (1998). The role of comprehension, reinterpretation and the Uniformity Condition in historical change: The case of the development of Cl clusters from Latin to Hispano-Romance. In V. Samiian (Ed.), Proceedings of the twenty-sixth Western Conference on Linguistics, (pp. 133–148). Fresno, CA: Department of Linguistics, California State University, Fresno.
Holt, D.E. (1999). Underspecification, constriction-based vowel geometry and scalar raising in Asturiano. The 73rd annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, January 7–10, Los Angeles, CA.
Holt, D.E. (2000). Comparative optimality-theoretic dialectology: Singular/plural nasal alternations in Galician, Mirandese (Leonese) and Spanish. In H. Campos, E. Herburger, Alfonso Morales-Front, & T.J. Walsh (Eds.), Papers from the third Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (pp. 125–143). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Holt, D.E.(Ed.). (2003a). Optimality theory and language change. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Holt, D.E. (2003b). The emergence of palatal sonorants and alternating diphthongs in Hispano-Romance. In Holt (Ed.), 2003a (pp. 285–305).
Holt, D.E. (2004). Optimization of syllable contact in Old Spanish via the sporadic sound change metathesis. Probus: International Journal of Latin and Romance Linguistics, 16, 43–61.
Hualde, J.I. (1998). Autosegmental and metrical spreading in the vowel-harmony systems of northwestern Spain. Linguistics, 27, 773–805.
Hualde, J.I. (2005). The sounds of Spanish. Cambridge: CUP.
Jiménez, J., & Lloret, M.R. (2007). Andalusian vowel harmony: Weak triggers and perceptibility. The 4th Old World Conference in Phonology (Workshop on harmony in the languages of the Mediterranean). Rhodes, January 18–21.
Lacerda, A., & Rossi, N. (1958). Particularidades fonéticas do comportamento elocucional do Falar do RJ. Coimbra: Impressora da Universidade de Coimbra.
Lapesa, R. (1986). Historia de la lengua española. Madrid: Gredos.
Leite de Vasconcelos, J. (1900). Estudos de philologia mirandesa. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional.
Lipski, J.M. (1984). Latin American Spanish. London: Longman.
Lipski, J.M. (1985). Brazilian Portuguese vowel nasalization: Secondary aspects. Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 20, 59–77.
Lipski, J.M. (1989a). Spanish yeísmo and the palatal resonants: Towards a unified analysis. Probus, 1, 211–223.
Lipski, J.M. (1989b). /s/ voicing in Ecuadorian Spanish: Patterns and principles of consonantal Modification. Lingua, 79, 49–71.
Lleó, C. (2003). Some interactions between word, foot, and syllable structure in the history of Spanish. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 56, 249–283.
Lloyd, P.M. (1987) From Latin to Spanish. Vol. I: Historical phonology and morphology of the Spanish language. Philadelphia PA: The American Philosophical Society.
Lloyd, P.M. (1994). Contribution to the study of the syllable structure of Old Spanish.
The Modern Language Association meeting
, San Diego, California. December 28.
Luís, A., & Spencer, A. (2005). A paradigm function account of ‘mesoclisis’ in European Portuguese. Yearbook of Morphology, 2004, 177–228.
Manzini, M.R., & Savoia, L.M. (2011). Mesoclisis in the imperative: Phonology, morphology or syntax? Lingua, 121,1101–1120.
Marins, F., & Margotti, F. (2012). Comportamento fonético-fonológico do /S/ pós-vocálico em Manaus. Revista Investigações, 25(2), 249–274.
Martinet, A. (1974). Economía de los cambios fonéticos: Tratado de fonologia diacrónica. Madrid: Gredos.
Martínez-Gil, F. (2003). Consonant intrusion in heterosyllabic consonant-liquid clusters in Old Spanish and Old French: An optimality theoretical account. In R. Cameron, L. López & R. Núñez-Cedeño (Eds.), A Romance perspective in language knowledge and use: Selected papers from the 31st Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (pp. 39–58). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Masip, V. (1999). Curso de fonología y ortografía española para brasileiros. Barcelona: Difusión.
Mateus, M.H. & d’Andrade, E. (2000). The phonology of Portuguese. Oxford: OUP.
Mattoso Camara, J. (1970). Estrutura da língua portuguesa. Petrópolis: Vozes.
Mattoso Camara, J. (1972). The Portuguese language. (A. J. Naro, Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
McCarthy, J.J. (1984). Theoretical consequences of Montañés vowel harmony. Linguistic Inquiry, 15, 291–318.
Medeiros, B. (2011). Nasal coda and vowel nasality in Brazilian Portuguese. In S.M. Alvord (Ed.), Selected proceedings of the 5th conference on laboratory approaches to Romance phonology (pp. 33–45). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Meillet, A. (1970). General characteristics of the Germanic languages. (W.P. Dismukes, Trans.). Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press.
de Moraes Ferreira, A.J. (1898). Dialecto mirandez. Lisbon: da Silva.
Morais-Barbosa, J. (1962). Les voyelles nasales portugaises: Interprétation phonologique. In A. Rigault (Ed.), Proceedings of the Fourth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 691–708). The Hague: Mouton.
Morales-Front, A. & Holt, D.E. (1997). On the interplay of morphology, prosody and faithfulness in Portuguese pluralization. In F. Martínez-Gil & A. Morales-Front (Eds.), Issues in the phonology and morphology of the major Iberian languages, (393–437). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Naro, A. (1981). The social and structural dimensions of a syntactic change. Language, 57, 63–98.
Nunes, J.J. (1989). Compêndio de gramática histórica portuguesa: Fonética e morfologia (9th ed.). Lisbon: Livraria Clássica Editora.
Oliver, Julia. (2008). Vowel raising in Puerto Rican Spanish. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Illinois, Chicago, IL.
Padgett, J. (1991). Stricture in feature geometry. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Massachusetts: (Revised version published 1995, Stanford, CA: CSLI.)
Padgett, J. (2003). The emergence of contrastive palatalization in Russian. In D.E. Holt (Ed.), Optimality theory and language change, (307–335). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Palácio, A. (1989). Um caso de permulta consonantica no dialeto do Recife. In A.T. Castilho (Ed.), Português falado no Brasil, (25–33). Campinas: Editora UNICAMP.
Parkinson, S. (1983). Portuguese nasal vowels as phonological diphthongs. Lingua, 61, 157–77.
Parkinson, S. (1988). Portuguese. In M. Harris & N. Vincent (Eds.), The Romance languages (pp. 131–169). Oxford: OUP.
Peixoto, J. (2011). O ditongo em Português: História, variação e gramática. Revista Linguística, 7, 77–111.
Penny, R. (1969). Vowel harmony in the speech of the Montes de Pas (Santander). Orbis, 18, 148–166.
Penny, R. (1991). A history of the Spanish language. Cambridge: CUP.
Penny, R. (2009). Vowel harmony and metaphony in Iberia: A revised analysis. Estudos de Lingüística Galega, 1, 113–124.
Perez, J.I. (1982). Observaciones en torno a la desaparición de la -N- intervocálica en gallego. Verba, 9, 201–213.
Perini, M.A. (2002). Modern Portuguese: A reference grammar. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Porzio Gernia, M L. (1976). Tendenze strutturali della sillaba latina in età arcaica e classica. Scritti in onore de G. Bonfante (pp. 757–779). Brescia: Paideira Editrice.
Quilis, A. (1993). Tratado de fonología e fonética españolas. Madrid: Editorial Gredos.
Reed, D., & Leite, Y. (1956). The segmental phonemes of Brazilian Portuguese: Standard Paulista dialect. In K. Pike (Ed.), Phonemics: A technique for reducing language to writing (pp. 194–202). Ann Harbor, MI: University of Michigan.
Sampson, R. (1999). Nasal vowel evolution in Romance. Oxford: OUP.
Scherre, M. (2001). Phrase-level parallelism effect on noun phrase number agreement. Language Variation and Change, 13, 91–107.
Scherre, M., & Naro, A. (2006). Mudança sem mudança: A concordância de número no português brasileiro. Scripta, 9, 107–129.
Selkirk, E. (1984). On the major class features and syllable theory. In M. Aronoff & R. Oehrle (Eds.), Language sound structure: Studies in phonology (pp. 107–136). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Shosted, R. (2006). Vocalic context as a condition for nasal coda emergence: Aerodynamic evidence. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 36,39–58.
Simioni, T. (2008). The clitic and its place in the prosodic structure in Brazilian Portuguese. Alfa, 52(2), 431–446.
Vásquez Cuesta, P., & Mendes da Luz, M.A. (1980).
Gramática da língua portuguesa
. Lisboa: Edições 70.
Veloso, J. (2002). Do fricative+plosive onsets exist word-initially in European Portuguese? In K. Petrova, A. Eftimova, & R. Shopov (Eds.), Litora psycholinguistica (pp. 49–56). Sófia: Sema RSH.
Vieira, M.J. (2002). As vogais médias postônicas: Uma análise variacionista. In L. Bisol & C. Brescancini (Eds.), Fonologia e variação: Recortes do Português, (127–159). Porto Alegre: EDIPUCRS.
Walker, R. (2005). Weak triggers in vowel harmony. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 23, 917–989.
Walker,R. (2011). Vowel patterns in language. Cambridge: CUP.
Walsh-Dickey, L. (1997). The phonology of liquids. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA.
Wetzels, W.L. (1995). Midvowel alternations in the Brazilian Portuguese verb. Phonology, 12, 281–304.
Williams, E.B. (1962). From Latin to Portuguese: Historical phonology and morphology of the Portuguese language. Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Wireback, K.J. (1996). On the palatalization of /kl/, /pl/, and /fl/ in Hispano-Romance. Paper presented at the 49th Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, University of Kentucky, April 19.
Zec, D. (1995). Sonority constraints on syllable structure. Phonology, 12, 85–129.
Zubizarreta, M.L. (1979). Vowel harmony in Andalusian Spanish. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 1,1–11.
Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Gilbert, Madeline
2023.
Conflicting standards and variability: Spirantization in two varieties of Uruguayan Spanish.
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 16:2
► pp. 397 ff.
Sessarego, Sandro & Letania Ferreira
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 6 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.