Optimality Theory and language change in Spanish

The present chapter discusses Optimality-Theoretic approaches to language change in Spanish, reviewing a number of works that invoke not only the interaction of faithfulness and markedness constraints, but also the role of perceptual, cognitive, systemic and external influences on linguistic structure and change at the level of segment and segmental inventory, syllable- and prosodic structure, and intersecting points of morphology, and mentions formal considerations that impact these. The chapter concludes with an appendix that attempts to list all works published to date that treat language change and variation in Spanish and Hispano-Romance from an OT perspective.