The primary interest of sandhi in Romance is as a morphological phenomenon. Adaptation of word forms to a variety of sandhi contexts gives rise to allomorphy (paradigmatic variation). Such adaptation reflects natural phonological processes which tend to reduce the markedness of sequences of phonological elements. We illustrate from Catalan and French strategies to avoid hiatus, and from Catalan and Occitan strategies to simplify consonant clusters. Romance also attests subphonemic alternations in sandhi environments, and we draw attention to cases such as intersonorant lenition of initial voiced stops in much of south-western Romance. A striking feature of Romance sandhi alternations is the readiness with which they may become morphologized or lexicalized. This outcome may arise from subsequent sound changes that make the original motivated alternation opaque, or from levelling of allomorphic alternation that makes the distribution of allomorphs opaque. We review an example of such a change in progress: the aspiration/loss of coda /s/ in Andalusian Spanish. Occasionally, a morphologized/lexicalized alternation may be (partly) remotivated, as is famously the case with rafforzamento fonosintattico ‘phonosyntactic strengthening’ in standard Italian. However, the phenomena of elision and liaison in modern French exemplify morphophonemic arbitrariness with very extensive incidence.

In this chapter the editors introduce the book and its aim of showing how the study of comparative and historical data from the Romance languages can illuminate general linguistics. After a brief presentation of the volume and its structure, the editors reflect on how their personal experiences of working with data from the Romance languages have led them to reflect on wider issues in general ling uistics. Recurrent themes in their work have been, respectively, morphosyntactic change (Ledgeway) and sound change and its morphological consequences (Maiden). Among the topics whose theoretical implications are explored are: parametric variation, universals, typological variation, pro-drop, word order, linguistic theory and philology, complementizer systems, the interaction of phonological and morphological factors in morphologization, the problem of defining a language family, and the perils of ‘standard language bias’ in the practice of historical linguistics. While these may appear a quite heterogeneous set of issues, they are treated in a way that prompts some major shared fundamental conclusions, in particular that Romance linguistics can make its most powerful contributions to general linguistics when Romance linguists exploit to the maximum the extraordinary wealth of historical and comparative data which the Romance languages and dialects offer them.