This paper proposes that word minimality, correlated with a bimoraic foot, provides a unitary account of three separate historical developments in the Hispano-Romance languages, to date considered unrelated: the preservation of a word-final nasal, the change /ee/ > /ej/, and yod augmentation in… read more
The main goal of this paper is to argue for a unified analysis of two stepwise vowel raising processes known as metaphony, those of Proto-Spanish and Lena Asturian, within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT). It is shown that previous serial accounts based on autosegmental spreading rules… read more