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Maria José Carvalho
CELGA-ILTEC, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra
Portugal
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0353-5217
Biography
Vol 15 No 1 (2023): Estudos de Lingüística Galega, Pescuda
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15304/elg.15.8587
Submitted: 28-07-2022 Accepted: 25-02-2023 Published: 21-08-2023
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Abstract

From the evidence provided by medieval notarial documentation from a coastal area of central Portugal, this article traces the chronology of some changes in the timbre of Portuguese tonic vowels (particularly metaphony and vowel inflection), which have rarely been mentioned in works on historical phonetics, in etymological dictionaries or in other lexicographic studies of this Romance language. This study is based on a corpus of 153 original notarial documents, dating from between the 13th and the 16th centuries, from the holdings of the Monastery of Santa Maria de Alcobaça (IAN-TT, Lisboa, 1.ª e 2.ª incorporações), which I have transcribed, paying scrupulous attention to the manuscript (Carvalho 2017). This study aims to provide some data to help clarify why metaphony and vowel inflection did not affect particular lexical items in the same way in Portuguese, Galician, Asturian and Castilian, throughout their development over time. On top of providing information about the direction and the rhythm of change, chronologies can also demonstrate a significant continuum in the history of Iberian-Romance languages, stressing the interdependence of phonological, prosodic, semantic, lexical, contextual and discursive factors in this process of diffusion.