phonological rules (summary)

[Frederick J Newmeyer]

Dear Funknetters,

Last week I posted a request for literature references on the degree to which classical phonology (discrete rules, regular sound change) seems to be refuted by the 'usage-based' work of Bybee and others that stresses the importance of relative frequency of variants, 'exemplars' embodying multiple representations instead of discrete phonological units, and so on. I received several responses with references that seem to support more classical views. I summarise them below without personal comment:

1. Work in natural phonology (Donegan 2014; Donegan & Nathan 2014) defends the existence of 'phonological processes', which, like classical phonemic statements, are holistic characterisations of (non-morphological) phonological alternations, rather than the item-by-item representations provided by usage-based models.

2. Along these lines, work going back to Baudouin de Courtenay and Sapir and continuing to the present day supports the psychological reality of the phoneme (or its generative counterpart), not just that of individual phonetic elements.

3. Labov (1994) provides a typology of phonological change, in which the classic Neogrammarian view of exceptionless change plays a major role.

4. Kiparsky (1995) argues that lexical diffusion (which prima facie calls into question the classical model) is a form of analogical change and not 'sound change' per se.

5. (Degree of) gradience does not enter into statements of phonological processes or phonological change. For example, a phonological rule might be sensitive to whether a following segment is nasal, but not to its *degree* of nasalisation.

Thank you all for your replies.

Fritz

REFERENCES

Donegan, Patricia J. (2014), 'The emergence of phonological representation', in Brian MacWhinney and William O'Grady (eds.), Handbook of language emergence. Boston: Wiley.

Donegan, Patricia J. and Geoffrey S. Nathan (2014), 'Natural phonology and sound change', in Patrick Honeybone and Joseph Salmons (eds.), Oxford handbook of historical phonology, Oxford University Press. Oxford.

Kiparsky, Paul (1995), 'The phonological basis of sound change', in John A. Goldsmith (ed.), The handbook of phonological theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 640-70.

Labov, William (1994), Principles of linguistic change. Volume 1: Internal factors, Language in Society, 20. Oxford: Blackwell.





Frederick J. Newmeyer
Professor Emeritus, University of Washington
Adjunct Professor, U of British Columbia and Simon Fraser U
[for my postal address, please contact me by e-mail]