Matthias Heinz

Syllable types and lexicons are subject to diachronic language contact influences, as shown by the phonotactics and loanword vocabulary of many Romance languages. On one hand, there is a tendency towards the simplification of syllable structures or a reduction in syllable typological complexity: the universally simplest, high-frequency syllable type CV often shapes lexical forms. On the other hand, the persistence of complex structures can be observed, especially in languages with a long tradition of writing, such as Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian, and Romanian. Here, loanwords of learned origin exhibit the preservation of syllabic complexity, while in languages like Portuguese (European variety) or Standard French, complex syllable types can also result from the tendency to eliminate unstressed vowels. A center-periphery arrangement of the underlying subsystems can be identified, which is theoretically developed in the study within the framework of a phonotactic typology of the Romance languages and transferred to further levels of the language system.