Transcript Document

Putting together the pieces
An intra-disciplinary look at sound change
Outline
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
Background on Neogrammarian Controversy
Why the controversy is ongoing
Why the split is unnecessary and problematic
End to Neogrammarian Controversy
Proposed solution: analogy all the way down
Examples and discussion of usage-based
models
7) Conclusion
1) Background on the Neogrammarian
Controversy
Neogrammarian Controversy
Neogrammarian sound change (“regular sound
change” or “sound change proper”)
1) exceptionless
2) phonetically (i.e., physically) motivated
Other key players: analogy and dialect borrowing
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The Neogrammarians
Aller Lautwandel, soweit er mechanisch vor sich geht, vollzieht sich nach
ausnahmslosen Gesetzen, d.h. die Richtung der Lautbewegung ist in
allen Angehörigen einer Sprachgenossenschaft, ausser dem Fall, dass die
Dialektspaltung eintritt stetts dieselbe, und all W örter, in denen der der
Lautbewegung unterworfene Laut unter gleichen Verhältnissen erscheint,
werden ohne ausnahme von der Änderung ergriffen.(Wilbur 1977: xl,
reproducing Brugmann’s Vorwort to Morphologische Untersuchungen
xiii)
[Every sound change, as long as it proceeds physically, comes to
completion by following exceptionless rules, i.e., the course of sound
change is in every member of a speech community, unless dialect split is
caused by the change, and all words in which the sound appears in the
same conditioning environment, will, without exception, be subject to the
change.] (my translation)
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The Neogrammarians
Neogrammarian principles:
Invoking the uniformitarian theory, they argued that analogy was a natural
mechanism of change in the present, thus also the past.
With analogy and dialect borrowing in their toolkit, they argued that one
didn’t need a new sound law to describe every change or deviation from
otherwise regular-seeming sound change.
So they postulated that “sound change” [Lautgesetze] must be limited to
those following the principles of phonetic motivation and
exceptionlessness.
Based on their experience, it seemed that regularity might be limited to
phonetically driven [mechanisch] changes, and analogy could cover the
more sporadic, cognitively-driven [geistlich] changes.
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Arguments with mechanism of sound change
Lexical Diffusion: whether sound change can proceed word by
word, possibly leaving some words unchanged
Grammatical Conditioning: whether regular sound change can
be conditioned or blocked by non-phonetic factors vs
analogical repair
Language-internal vs. external factors: what role do social
factors play
Physical vs analogical: what is phonetic vs cognitive
Actuation vs expansion: what is sound change proper vs spread
of sound change
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Mechanism of sound change
Centuries-old sound changes cannot be entirely proven to have
developed through one or another process because we can’t
go back to the beginning and witness it.
Descriptions of sound change in progress are subject to debate
because once “in progress”, they beginning is past; although
we can observe sound change development.
The most compelling reason for the more recent attempts to
delineate sound change, or “actuation,” from “expansion”:
Expansion of sound changes in progress frequently do not
obey the rules of Neogrammarian sound change because
they are subject to processes of multiple kinds of analogy
and the influence of social factors.
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2) Why the controversy is ongoing
Why the controversy is ongoing
To maintain hold on comparative method, which is
less effective the less regular the correspondence
sets are.
Analogical forms and borrowings aren’t compared
because they aren’t considered regular processes.
We need the comparative method to establish
language relationships.
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Why the continued controversy?
Neogrammarians are insistent because they want an
explanation for what motivates regularity, some kind of
universal, or at least default, principle.
The original Neogrammarians were fighting against an
endless supply of speculation and non-universals. They
were trying to nail down something more reliable, that
generalizations could be drawn from that might teach us
something useful about language and allow us to be sure
that we are reconstructing languages and establishing
relationships based on principled methods rather than
guesswork (Wilbur 1977).
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3) Why the split is unnecessary and
problematic
Why the split is unnecessary and problematic
Plenty of processes can have regular outcome without being
purely phonetically motivated.
- Analogy (morphological, lexical, phonological)
- Hypercorrection (Pargman 1998)
Some phonetically-motivated processes discounted by
Neogrammarians can display more-or-less regular
outcomes
- Dissimilation (Grassmann’s Law)
- Metathesis (Hock 1985)
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Why the split is unnecessary and problematic
Many of the Neogrammarian’s Lautgesetze (sound laws) such
as Grimm’s law or the Old High German Consonant Shift
were chain shifts or parallel shifts, which can’t be purely
phonetic because they involve acoustics and perception,
and are most likely analogical because they involve
phonemic re-categorization based on what other phonemes
are doing.
Even assimilation, especially anticipatory assimilation, must
begin in the mind. Your articulators don’t “know” what
sounds are coming up, but your mind does, and prepares
for them by making an earlier sound more like a later.
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Why the split is unnecessary and problematic
Plenty of phonetically-motivated changes can be irregular.
- incomplete sound changes
- near-mergers and near-splits
Phonetically motivated “mini-sound changes” (Ohala 2003)
may not spread, and usually don’t.
Variation occurs even within probabilistic regularity.
Low-level phonetic variation can persist over long periods of
time without leading to sound change; the variation has to
cause categorical change before it is registered as a sound
change, which can depend on the perceptual space, lexical
items involved, frequency, social identification, and other
non-physical factors.
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Why the split is unnecessary and problematic
Having a default assumption that sound change will proceed
exceptionlessly as long as it is phonetically driven leaves
us with a lot of exceptions.
The assumption is based on our ability to find more frequent
regularity in phonetically conditioned and unconditioned
sound changes.
But exceptions abound.
No proof of what about phonetically motivated sound change
would make it more likely to be regular.
A phonological conditioning environment is only a
description, not an explanation.
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Why the split is unnecessary and problematic
We don’t have to throw regularity out the window…
On the basis of finding and establishing regular sound
correspondences, we can still find statistical regularity, and
investigate exceptions.
Statistical regularity can still give way to outliers - the outliers
should be investigated in any case
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4) Resolution of the Neogrammarian
Controversy
Resolution of the Neogrammarian
Controversy
Neogrammarian sound change, at least as laid out by
the Neogrammarians, cannot exist. Here’s why:
1) Neogrammarian Sound change must be
exceptionless
2) Neogrammarian Sound change must proceed
mechanically, that is purely physically
(phonetically).
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Resolution of the Neogrammarian
Controversy
1) There is no such thing as exceptionlessness, only an
endless cycle of variation and generalization.
That is, even regular sound change is only
probabilistically regular, including phonemic and
non-phonemic variation
Because all synchronically “stable” sounds also
exhibit phonemic and non-phonemic variation
(Peterson and Barney 1952, Ladefoged and
Broadbent 1957, among many others)
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Resolution of the Neogrammarian
Controversy
2) No aspect of language can be removed from cognitive
processes because production is entrenched in a feedback
loop with perception; therefore, analogical processes are at
work before, during, and after each utterance.
At its most basic, analogy is the association of some
thing with some other group of things.
Phoneme identification is the association of an
unspecified period of sound, varying along many, mostly
continuous dimensions, with other such continuously
varying productions, to arrive at a shared category.
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Resolution of the Neogrammarian
Controversy
Infants must learn to generalize the stream of random and
non-random noise emanating from their caregivers into
words and sounds before they begin to speak.
Infants at 6 months and younger can distinguish
between syllables differing by a distinctive feature, but
lose the ability to distinguish within phonemic categories
of their L1 after they have begun to generalize what
phonetic information is relevant to their L1 by around 1012 months (Werker and Polka 1993)
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5) Proposed solution:
Analogy all the way down
Analogy all the way down
Variation in production of speech sounds has a basis
in both articulatory and cognitive factors
Regularity happens because the mind is predisposed
to form patterns and generalizations from the input
it receives. From a continuous stream of sound,
the mind breaks the input down into components
and stores the information based on association.
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Analogy all the way down
Probably the most automatic of these is the
segmentation of the sound wave into words.
Words are more easily and quickly recognized
than syllables, which are more easily and quickly
recognized than phonemes (Mehler, Dupous and
Segui 1990; Werker and Polka 1993).
And from the lexicon, associations of similar sounds
into phoneme-like groupings can be derived
(Beckman and Edwards 2000).
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Analogy all the way down
Each token uttered, across a range of variability, is
generalized both by phoneme and by word (and
across other associated elements).
This explains why there is evidence not only for
what one could call phonologically analogical
sound change, and for lexical diffusion (lexical
analogy), but also mixed cases, rare instances of
grammatical conditioning, and association with
social factors involving the spread of sound
change
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Analogy all the way down
The reason sound changes that have their roots in socalled phonetic motivation (either phonetically
conditioned or completely unconditioned) end up
being more frequently regular is because they are
easily phonologically generalizable.
Phonological generalization generally happens
below the level of consciousness, though it can
become more conscious if marked by greater
distance from the previous phonological
perceptual structure or if marked by social factors.
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Analogy all the way down
Note: understanding that all sound change is rooted
in analogical processes does not mean that we
can’t have regularity, nor does it exempt us from
explaining all sound changes - rather it holds us to
a higher degree of specificity, that we must explain
how each instance and pattern of analogy worked,
and what it was based on.
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6) Examples and discussion:
Usage-based (exemplar) models
Usage-based (exemplar) models
Exemplar models can account for spread (social factors) of
sound change (cf. Pierrehumbert 2006):
A tight network has more limited variation, and is more likely
to reinforce whatever pattern the variation is taking
(including change)
A loose network has much more potential for variation,
sometimes having a centering effect on the mode
Status, affiliation, or other sociolinguistic factors can lend
weight to exemplars with these features
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Usage-based (exemplar) models
Exemplar models can account for rate of sound change:
Phonetic change can proceed only as quickly as can be
calculated by total accumulated tokens and frequency of
tokens and acoustic distance between tokens
But some factors can speed up the change, such as if the
distance between earlier tokens and newer tokens
increases, the new locus will shift more quickly.
This explains the sigmoidal curve described by variationists.
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Usage-based (exemplar) models
If the variation is inconsistent, that is new tokens are also
widely dispersed, then low-level, underlying variation can
persist for a long time.
Lexical items play a role in this, such that sounds can be
recategorized due to their presence in a word with no
minimal pair for that phoneme. Hence, the further the
nearest phoneme and the fewer possible minimal pairs, the
more able to re-generalize.
If the difference between tokens is so perceptible as to be
assigned social meaning, the change then can become a
matter of higher-level operations (e.g., choice of variants
for social reasons) and is also accelerated (and may be
more prone to error).
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Example- non-phonetically conditioned
possibly phonemic variation
Mini-sound change -- the bang/bangs split, a very mixed affair:
1) Normal raised /ae/ before /ng/
Very raised to /e/ in some words
2) Dialect borrowing -D1 = /e/, D2 = /ae/
3) More frequent words develop into separate variants in free
variation (dang, bang, blanket)
4) Infrequent words (bangs, bank shot, blankie) belong to one
phonemic category /e/
5) Infrequent, but higher register (later learned?) words belong
to one category /ae/ (dank, vanquish, manx)
6) Transitive form of verbs more likely to have /e/ (hang, rang)
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Example- non-phonetically conditioned
possibly phonemic variation
Other Northern transplants in the community, beyond family.
One could imagine how this might become a sound change.
The split might continue and be adopted by others.
Phonemic categories might emerge from various
generalizations:
lexical (some words develop as /ae/ others /e/)
grammatical (the trend for transitive verbs becomes
more generalized)
phonological (some generalization following certain
classes of sounds, such as coronals, for instance)
It could become regular if enough people adopted the split
along the same lines of generalization
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7) Conclusion
Conclusion
Hans Henrich Hock (2003), also discussing the
scope of analogy in sound change, poses a similar
question:
“where in this continuum should we draw the
dividing line, on what grounds should we draw it,
and should we draw one at all?”
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Conclusion
I propose that, rather than drawing lines in the sand, we
should be more explanatory.
For example, we should answer these questions:
Is it sound change (is one phoneme different between two
stages?)
What changes? And what are the conditions for change?
How regular is it (r2, what % of variation is accounted for by
the proposed conditions)?
Explain any apparent exceptions/outliers.
What is/are the proposed mechanism/s of change?
Is there any synchronic evidence for the postulated
mechanisms?
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Conclusion
Divisions into categories of sound change are similar to
clusters of phonetic commonalities into phonemes. The
categories have overlapping features based on association,
corresponding to transparency of analogical processes,
linguistic category, language intrinsic vs not, actuation vs
expansion, etc. And we are statistically correct in saying that
changes that emerge as phonologically conditioned are more
frequently of higher regularity than others.
Analogical processes are the default, and irregular and
incomplete sound changes are the same kind of creature as
regular sound changes, only with more exceptions, which
could be argued in the reverse as the result of other
regularizing processes that sound change got in the way of.
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Conclusion
If you want an absolute, undeniable basis for sound change, the
“Big Bang” (Janda and Joseph 2003), it is phonetic variation.
The fact that no two productions are exactly alike means that we
have to generalize what we hear to correspond with what we
have heard previously and all that we associate it with. This
means that the acoustic space is a dynamic, evolving perceptual
system that requires generalization, or analogical processes, to
derive categories of sounds, and also words, meaning, and all
the stuff that makes language work. No matter what
interdependent processes take place to create sound change,
there must be variants (more or less differing from one another)
and association of those variants with one or more derived
categories, such as phoneme, word, register, or status.
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Conclusion
The Neogrammarians were correct in that regular
sound change does have its basis in phonetics, and
that is phonetic variation; though so does irregular,
incomplete, and every other kind of imaginable
sound change.
Regular sound change relies on the analogical
workings of the inner mind.
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References
Beckman, M.E., & Edwards, J. (2000). The ontogeny of phonological categories and the primacy of lexical learning
in linguistic development. Child Development, 71, 240-249.
Garner, W. (1974). The Processing of Information and Structure. Oxford: Erlbaum.
Hock, H. H. (1985) Regular Metathesis. Linguistics 23, 529-546.
Hock, H. H. (2003) Analogy. In Joseph, B. and Janda, R. 2003.The Handbook of Historical Linguistics. Malden,
MA: Blackwell.
Janda, R. and Joseph, B. (2003) Reconsidering the Canons of Sound-Change: Towards a ‘Big Bang’ Theory.
Historical Linguistics 2001. Selected Papers from the 15th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, ed.
by Barry Blake and Kate Burridge. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 205-219.
Johnson, K. (1997). Speech Perception without speaker normalization. IN K. Johnson and J. Mullenix (eds.), Talker
variability in speech processing. San Diego: Academic Press. 145-166.
Labov, W. (1981) Resolving the Neogrammarian Controversy. Language 57 (2): 267-308
Mullenix, J. And Pisoni, D. (1990) Stimulus variability and processing dependencies in speech perception.
Perception and Psychophysics, 47 (4): 379-390.
Ohala, J. (2003). Phonetics and Historical Phonology. In Joseph, B. and Janda, R. 2003.The Handbook of Historical
Linguistics. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Pargman, S. (1998). On the Regularity of Hypercorrection in Phonological Change. Diachronica 15, 285-307
Pierrhumbert, J. (2006). The next toolkit. Journal of Phonetics 34, 516-530
Werker, J. F. and Polka, L. (1993). Developmental changes in speech perception: new challenges and new directions.
Journal of Phonetics 21, 83-101
Wilbur, Terence (ed.) (1977). The Lautgesetz Controversy: a documentation (1885-86). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Extra Slides
Warning
The following images are highly
oversimplified representations
Separate accumulation of variation of two
distant phonemes
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Accumulation of exemplars around a mode of
variation
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Neighboring phonemes
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Very limited variation causes reinforcement of
phoneme categories
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Wide range of variation causes overlap of
phonemes
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Empty acoustic space allows more room for
variation
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Categorically different variants
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Beginning of sound shift: accumulation of
new center of variation
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Sound shift: new sound is as prevalent as old
sound
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Sound shift: new mode covers accumulated
variation, shifts toward center
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Sound shift is complete: new mode is centered
around new target pronunciation
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Why the split is unnecessary and problematic
To follow up on an earlier elaboration : if we say
that V1qV2 => V1ðV2 / only if V1 is not accented,
it is no more explanatory of sound change than if
we said V1qV2 => V1ðV2 / intransitive verbs
A phonological conditioning environment gives us a
chance to examine why that environment might
motivate a change, or how such a change may
proceed, but is not, in itself, an explanation.
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Resolution of the Neogrammarian
Controversy
If we can bring all of the important characteristics of the phonetics of a
vowel together (including duration, F0, F1, F2, F3, phonation type)
with associated information from its carrier phrase (including
semantics, syntax, intonation, other measurements of other vowels and
consonants both near and far) and the speaker (including age, height,
gender, dialect, affiliation) to determine whether we hear the sound in
pin or in pen, for example (Garner 1974, Mullenix and Pisoni 1990,
Johnson 1997, among others), why would it seem strange that we form
associations among these factors, which sometimes lead to the
beginning or expansion of sound change?
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Example- phonetic (non-phonemic) variation
Stable, underlying variation across the dental fricative in
American English in Ohio.
1) Production (in manner) extends from near-vocalic
approximants to plosives
- No competition in manner at same place of articulation
2) Production extends across a range of voicing and sonority
- Voicing carries virtually no functional load
3) Variation in place is mostly limited to alveolar, dental and
interdental, and mostly to the voiced phoneme, which is
more likely to become alveolar.
- No other associations in competition
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