On the Metathesis of Labials + /j/ in Hispano-Romance

Abstract

1. Introduction DURING the period of time extending from the spoken Latin of the Iberian Peninsula, at the time of the Roman Empire, until the dawn of Old Spanish and Old Portuguese, several word-medial intervocalic consonant + palatal-glide sequences underwent metathesis to glide + consonant. In Spanish, this glide metathesis occurred regularly in the Latin /sj/ and /rj/ sequences, and additionally with Latin /sj/ and in certain stem allomorphs of two verbs, caber and saber. This is shown by the data in (1a). Therefore, in spite of the apparent lacuna of empirical support for an across-the-board style phonological metathesis rule, one might still postulate a diffusionist-style metathesis, whereby the metathesis progresses from lexical item to lexical item, e.g., BASIU > Hisp.Rom. *[baj.zo] 'kiss' through analogy with CASEU > Hisp.-Rom. *[kaj.zo] 'cheese' (Wireback 1997:124). To posit such a theory, however, one must show exactly how such a lexical change is propelled beyond the sporadic stage. That is, we know that metathesis can be a sporadic process (Lehmann 1992:204); examples of this are legion, and presumably regular metatheses begin as sporadic processes. What exactly allows these sporadic inversions to become regular, in the absence of a general synchronic rule? I would argue that the role played by perception is the determining factor. Blevins and Garrett (1998:510-517) account for cases of consonant + vowel metathesis that are similar to those exemplified above in (1) and (2) with the concept of perceptual metathesis. From their perspective, CV and /Cj/ metatheses originate when the consonant and the (semi)vowel contain an acoustic or perceptual feature with a rather long duration. For the Spanish and Portuguese cases of /Cj/ metathesis cited thus far, the feature in question would be palatalization. Ohala (1993:252; 1995:89-90) observes that while some articulatory features, like occlusive or affricate, are associated with rather rapid acoustic cues, other secondary articulations like palatalization, labialization, and glottalization tend to be relatively slow to develop in an acoustic sense, and thus temporally spread out. …