Within the larger context of the Romance languages, Romanian stands alone in exhibiting a surface contrast between plain and palatalized consonants (that is, consonants with a secondary palatal articulation). While the properties of secondary palatalization are well known for language families in which the set of palatalized consonants is considered phonemic, such as Slavic and Celtic, they have never been closely examined for Romanian within the Romance family.

The purpose of the present work is three-fold. First, it is aimed at providing a thorough descriptive account of secondary palatalization in Romanian, and thus focus on an under-documented phenomenon in a language family that has otherwise been studied extensively. Second, experimental work on the acoustics and perception of a series of plain and palatalized fricatives contributes to the typological picture of both fricatives and the plain-palatalized contrast, by investigating additional places of articulation, as well as a manner of articulation which has often been overlooked in previous research. Finally, the findings of this research permit us to address the larger theoretical question of markedness, as the behavior of Romanians was found to differ in certain respects from that of speakers of other languages in which secondary palatalization has been studied.

The general conclusion is that the findings reported in this dissertation point to a complex interaction of factors underlying the concept of markedness, including phonetic realization, the role played by manner of articulation, the impact of morphological conditioning, and the possibility of phonetic enhancement. Thus, markedness is viewed as an emergent phenomenon that is largely conditioned by language-specific factors. If, and in what ways, any universal properties can be found at the basis of the structures generally viewed as unmarked is a question still open to debate.