Abstract
This paper provides a broad empirical description and a close examination of how Catalan speakers sillabify sequences of vocoids of rising sonority within the lexicon (e.g., piano ‘piano’, clariana ‘clearing’ or avia ‘grandmother’). A survey with 381 words administered to 60 speakers has enabled us to identify two distinct varieties of Central Catalan: a more innovative variety (which displays a stronger tendency to glide formation) and a more conservative variety. This situation, together with a certain degree of inter-speaker variation found in the data, reveals the existence of language change in progress. Both varieties display clear prosodic regularities: word-initial positional effects (that is, gliding tends to be blocked in word-initial position; cf.m[iO]l ‘mewl’, p[ia]no ‘piano’, d[i@]dema ‘diadem’) and distance-to-stress effects (that is, gliding increases when the distance to the tonic syllable is greater; cf. d[i@]lecte ‘dialect’
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