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Putting together the pieces. An intra-disciplinary look at sound change. Outline. 1) Background on Neogrammarian Controversy 2) Why the controversy is ongoing 3) Why the split is unnecessary and problematic 4) End to Neogrammarian Controversy 5) Proposed solution: analogy all the way down
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Putting together the pieces An intra-disciplinary look at sound change
Outline 1) Background on Neogrammarian Controversy 2) Why the controversy is ongoing 3) Why the split is unnecessary and problematic 4) End to Neogrammarian Controversy 5) Proposed solution: analogy all the way down 6) Examples and discussion of usage-based models 7) Conclusion
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
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 Wörter, 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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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)
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.
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 10-12 months (Werker and Polka 1993)
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.
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).
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
Analogy all the way down The reason sound changes that have their roots in so-called 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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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)
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
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?”
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Warning The following images are highly oversimplified representations
Very limited variation causes reinforcement of phoneme categories
