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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.

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In this article I treat the optimization of syllable contact in Old Spanish, particularly the "bad syllable contact" brought about by pre-or posttonic syncope in Late Spoken Latin or by the concatenation of morphemes. As may be observed from the data below, speakers of Old Spanish made use of many repair strategies-metathesis, dissimilation, palatalization, intrusive stop formation, deletion and strengthening-the effect of which was to improve the transition between syllables. Interestingly, a single etymon may yield multiple variants, each evidencing one of these phenomena, though in Modern Spanish only one of these has survived, either the form that shows metathesis (when morphologically simple), or the fully faithful variant with verb plus clitic forms. (1.) 1 /dn/ (metathesis, palatalization, dissimilation)

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