David Eric Holt

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at University of South Carolina

This paper reports on the application of synalepha, the phonological process of merging or linking contiguous vowels across word boundaries, as in mi amigo [mi̯a.ˈmi.ɣ̞o], meaning ‘my friend’. We examine two English-speaking L1 groups learning Spanish as an L2 compared to a Spanish monolingual-speaking group and include a narrative-retell and a rea...

This article explores variation in the assimilation pattern of the nasal-liquid sequence in Korean. Approaches to nasal-lateral assimilation in Korean (Kang 2002, Sohn 2006), based on researcher intuition, assume that assimilation is categorical and only depends on morphological structure. However, this article critically examines these assumptions...

The Cambridge Handbook of Spanish Linguistics - edited by Kimberly L. Geeslin August 2018

Cambridge Core - Latin American Studies - The Cambridge Handbook of Spanish Linguistics - edited by Kimberly L. Geeslin

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To teach pronunciation, it is useful for students to learn about articulatory phonetics, and to practice manipulating features of consonants and vowels. While diagrams are often presented to achieve this, these are static, and it is helpful to visualize movements of articulators via useful companions such as websites that involve functional MRI and...

This chapter discusses the major phonological changes from Latin to Portuguese, highlighting the initial significance of the evolution of syllable structure, including the loss of contrastive vowel length and the concomitant loss of geminate and many syllable-final consonants. It first treats various issues related to the evolution of syllable stru...

Portuguese-Spanish Interfaces captures the diversity of encounters that these languages have known and explores their relevance for current linguistic theories. The book focuses on dimensions along which Portuguese and Spanish can be fruitfully compared and highlights the theoretical value of exploring points of interaction between closely related...

This book presents a comprehensive and critical overview of historical phonology as it stands today. Research from every part of the field is examined from a variety of theoretical perspectives and drawing on data from a wide range of languages. The book begins by considering key current research questions, the early history of the field, and the s...

Within the field of second language acquisition, studies of various grammatical aspects of Spanish as a foreign language are abundant, and while studies on pronunciation are not uncommon, they have mainly focused on segmental aspects (with some treating intonation or other suprasegmental aspects). This study targets the acquisition of two seldom-...

The 'bad syllable contact' that arose in Old Spanish, either by syncope or by morphological concatenation, led to the application of a variety of 'repair strategies', including metathesis, which optimize the transition from one syllable to the next, though the same etymon often showed several competing variants (Lt. cat(e)natu 'chained' > OSp. cadn...

The loss of contrastive vowel length in Late Latin is argued to have given rise to important changes in the consonantal system, whereby moraic status was affected according to increasing sonority: first was the reduction of obstruent geminates and the vocalization of syllable-final velars and l, then the simplification of the sonorants nn, ll to n,...

The present chapter frames Optimality-Theoretic approaches to phonological and morphosyntactic change in the context both of theoretical linguistics and of the questions asked in traditional historical linguistics. Previous traditional, standard generative and OT accounts are discussed, including principles of change invoked (e.g., Transparency Pri...

Optimality Theory and Language Change: -discusses many optimization and linguistic issues in great detail; -treats the history of a variety of languages, including English, French, Germanic, Galician/Portuguese, Latin, Russian, and Spanish; -shows that the application of OT allows for innovative and improved analyses; -allows researchers that appea...

Introduction PART ONE: THE PRESENT Studying Language Behaviour Acquisition Language Acquisition without Input? Language Acquisition in Exceptional Circumstances Language Behaviour and Linguistics PART TWO: THE PAST The Continuity Puzzle The Kanzi Project What Does It Really Teach Us? Missing Behavioural Links The Continuity Puzzle Revisited PART TH...

In his analysis of the koineization of multiple Romance dialects into modern Castilian Spanish, Donald Tuten (2000, 2003) describes the leveling of the preposition + definite article paradigms brought to Castile by dialectally diverse settlers. Contraction was frequent in many of these dialects; for example, con + la ("with" + f. sg. def. article)...

The central question that I address in this paper can be phrased as follows: What happened to consonant length from Latin to Hispano-Romance? The principal claim for which I argue here is that the development of the vocalic system of Latin Spoken Latin had a profound impact on that of the consonantal system, with the loss of contrastively long vowe...