The articulation of bilabial consonants: rhyme, poetic language and linguistic standard in the Habsburg era

Abstract

In the fi eld of diachronic Phonetics and Phonology, the time frame that spans the 15th to 17th centuries holds a great interest. The current investigation seeks to enrich the research on the dephonologization of the bilabial phonemes /b/ and /ß/ in Spanish, which is accomplished through an exhaustive analysis of rhymes found in several poetic works of outstanding authors of the Habsburg era. The study of the corpus is structured according to the diachronic and diatopic varieties, and it is organized based on a chronological-geographical division that classifies the authors according to their reigns and their belonging to the northern or southern area of the Iberian Peninsula. The aim is to off er a precise chronology of the expansion and conclusion of the process of neutralization of the bilabial phonemes, a process presumed to have commenced several centuries earlier.