Syllable and Segment in Latin

The role of synchronic phonological structure in guiding sound change is much debated, with a reductionist view claiming that the demands of speech production and perception alone motivate and constrain phonological development. We evaluate the role of syllable structure in five long-standing problems in Latin historical phonology, selected due to their apparent sensitivity to this structural unit: clear and dark /l/, inverse compensatory lengthening, syllabification before stop + liquid in vowel reduction, vocalic epenthesis in stop + /l/, and consonantal assimilations in voice, place, continuance, and nasality. We not only ascertain the phonological conditions for each phenomenon, but also reconstruct the motivations for the developments, developing a methodology for using evidence from noncurrent languages: ascertaining likely phonetic and phonological influences through investigating studies across languages, establishing a secure evidence base through detailed philological examination, reconstructing both the phonetics – through both general phonetic principles and pertinent experimental studies – and the relevant synchronic phonological structure of the language, and finally, evaluating the roles of phonetics and syllable structure in motivating and constraining change. We argue that on the whole, phonetics alone can explain the investigated changes, although syllable structure plays a role one step removed, governing categorical and gradient variants in surface realisation, such as the distribution of features, and duration of vowels. However, vocalic epenthesis demonstrates that a change which retrospectively appears identical to those which were phonetically based, may in fact have been initiated by analogy, motivated and constrained directly by both morphological and phonological structure.