all that sound change

[Ans van Kemenade]

Dear all,

 

Who of the respondents over the past few days would care to organise a
workshop on this at ICHL 19?

 

Cheers,

Ans van Kemenade

 

Ans van Kemenade

Radboud University Nijmegen, dept. of English

Postbus 9103

6500 HD Nijmegen

Tel. #31 (0)24 36 11422/12157

Fax. #31 (0)24 36 11882

 

HYPERLINK
"http://www.ru.nl/facultyofarts/englishdept/"http://www.ru.nl/facultyofarts/
englishdept/

HYPERLINK "http://www.ru.nl/cls/"http://www.ru.nl/cls/

 

Van: histling-l-bounces at mailman.rice.edu
[mailto:histling-l-bounces at mailman.rice.edu] Namens Henning Andersen
Verzonden: zondag 27 januari 2008 21:26
Aan: histling-l at mailman.rice.edu
Onderwerp: [Histling-l] 'reversed change' and 'deliberate change'

 

Hi all,

 

Regarding 'reversals'.

Brian's suggestion that we distinguish between true sound change and
socially driven changes reminds me of Kristin Bakken's (2001) paper
"Patterns of restitution of sound change", which I edited a few years ago.
In my discussion of the paper (2001: 8-9, 15-16) I went so far as to suggest
a terminological distinction:


"There are restorations, in which the loss of a constraint (say, through
phonological reanalysis) allows underlying representations to resurface.
Restorations are typically grammatically conditioned in that 'original'
morpheme shapes are restored only in environments where they were subject to
alternation. .."

"Distinct from such changes are restitutions, such as those exemplified in
Bakken's paper, which ensue from contact with a closely related language
variety (dialect or sociolect) with pronunciation norms that happen to be
phonologically more conservative in some respect. ... in reality such
restitutions ... do not differ from other phoneme substitutions in
individual lexemes that may occur through dialect contact .... Such a set of
restitutions or substitutions is not a phonological change--or even a single
change in the sense of a bounded, internally coherent historical event in
the given community's tradition of speaking. It is, properly speaking, just
a subset of a series of individual replacements of local word shapes with
borrowed ones, part of a smaller or larger relexification, motivated by the
individual word shapes' greater utility in interdialectal communication and
hence defined in pragmatic and semantic terms. The progression of such a
relexification begins as an elaboration of speakers' grammars, as elements
of a local tradition of speaking are matched with marked covariants
appropriate for specified pragmatic purposes. It runs to completion lexeme
by lexeme, as the traditional elements one by one fall into disuse,
superseded by the borrowed, more widely used, more viable alternatives. .."

 

Regarding 'deliberate change'

 

It is mostly valuable to draw the distinction between innovation and change.

 

Evidently individuals can enter deliberately made innovations into usage.
But whether deliberate innovations result in change depends on other
speakers' adopting them and using them, eventually to the exclusion of other
alternatives. Your academy or ministry of culture or big honcho can propose
a deliberate innovation. But whether it will ever have any practical effect
depends on the wisdom of the crowds. So in cases where the linguist doesn't
have positive evidence of all members of a community wittingly and
deliberately talking in lock-step, it is probably better to avoid the
expression "deliberate change" and talk of 'deliberate innovations' and
'changes initiated by deliberate innovations' instead.

 

 

--Henning

 

Henning Andersen, UCLA



References: Kristin Bakken's paper is in *Actualization. Linguistic Change
in Progress*, ed. by Henning Andersen, 59-78. I discuss it in the
introduction. The full text is available on request

 

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: 'Reversed change' dialect borrowing  (Sally Thomason)
   2. Re: 'Reversed change' dialect borrowing  (Sally Thomason)

   3. Re: 'Reversed change' dialect borrowing (Brian Joseph)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 06:54:48 -0500
From: Sally Thomason <thomason at umich.edu>
Subject: Re: [Histling-l] 'Reversed change' dialect borrowing

To: "Patrick McConvell" <Patrick.McConvell at aiatsis.gov.au>
Cc: histling-l at mailman.rice.edu
Message-ID: <4274.1201348488 at umich.edu>


Patrick,

  Oh, I'd never claim that *all* reversed changes
are deliberate; the reason I was focusing on deliberate
ones is that that was what my paper was about.

  Elsewhere in the same paper I talk about correspondence
rules (or what Jeff Heath has called borrowing routines)
-- Alan Dench's Australian example from his salvage
fieldwork in Western Australia is a wonderful instance.
In his case the speakers were aware of what they were
doing (at least when they were stimulated to think about
it); but there too, there are no doubt cases where
speakers apply correspondence rules without being
aware of what they're doing.

  -- Sally


------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 07:06:14 -0500
From: Sally Thomason <thomason at umich.edu>
Subject: Re: [Histling-l] 'Reversed change' dialect borrowing
To: histling-l at mailman.rice.edu
Message-ID: <4577.1201349174 at umich.edu>


About Peter's comment:

Well...I actually think we need to consider
carefully whether we "agree that it's not exactly typical
of what usually goes on".  One thing that has struck
me again and again over the past ten years or so, ever
since I got interested in this whole issue of
deliberate change, is that we merely *assume* that
most changes are non-deliberate throughout their
history.  We have very little evidence on this point.
I first heard about people making their dialects
more different from the dialect of the guys next door
when I read Peter's Dialects in Contact.  But ever
since I started giving talks here & there on deliberate
change, people have come up with new examples for me;
one such example was a case of deliberate dialect
divergence from Peru -- the people told the
fieldworker that they wanted to make sure they
retained their differentness from the people just
around the mountain from them, and so they deliberately
distorted the pronunciation of their own words in
a rule-governed way.

I do still believe that most linguistic change must
be non-deliberate.  That's the easiest way to account
for (for instance) regular sound change.  But I
also think that claims that the vast majority of

linguistic change is subconscious are on shaky
ground, as long as they lack evidence of any kind.
(I admit that I haven't the faintest idea how one
might go about gathering evidence.)

  -- Sally Thomason


------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 09:51:20 -0500 (EST)
From: Brian Joseph <bjoseph at ling.ohio-state.edu>
Subject: Re: [Histling-l] 'Reversed change' dialect borrowing
To: thomason at umich.edu (Sally Thomason)
Cc: histling-l at mailman.rice.edu
Message-ID: <E1JImNM-0002LK-00 at julius.ling.ohio-state.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Greetings -- this discussion is most interesting, and I
would like to add just a few observations; even if they are
not directly on target, I think this is an appropriate
forum to mention them and they are in any case provoked
by the recent postings.

First, even though no one has actually said this, so in a
sense I am either responding to a straw man or preaching to
the choir, let me note that this discussion shows why it is
useful to be precise about what we mean by "sound change".
In the cases brought out here, the event that was reversed was
a Neogrammarian-style (i.e. regular and phonetically driven)
sound change, what I like to call "sound change proper" or
"sound change in the strict sense" (or even simply "Neogrammarian
sound change") whereas the reversing event is a socially-driven
change.  Terminology is always tricky to be sure, but I would
love it if the term "sound change" were restricted to "sound
change proper" and some other term were invented for "changes in
sounds that are not sound change (in the strict sense)".  I often
tell my classes that as paradoxically as it might seem, not every
change in the sounds of a word is a matter of sound change (analogical
change, clippings, tabu deformation, and so on are all the sorts of
"other events" that can lead to changes in the pronunciation of a

word that are not Neogrammarian sound change in the strict sense).

Second, socially-driven events of change *can* show regularity (though
they need not), but typically lack the phonetic basis that is a hallmark
of Neogrammarian sound change.  We see this sort of thing in hypercorrection
all the time (Peter's.

Finally, it reminds me of what I said at my ICHL presentation this past
summer, namely that when we get right down to it, social factors can
trump everything else in change (or everything except for the most basic
immutable universal foundational aspects of language, to the extent there
are any and if there are to the extent we can identify them).

--Brian

Brian D. Joseph
The Ohio State University


> About Peter's comment:
>
> Well...I actually think we need to consider
> carefully whether we "agree that it's not exactly typical
> of what usually goes on".  One thing that has struck
> me again and again over the past ten years or so, ever
> since I got interested in this whole issue of
> deliberate change, is that we merely *assume* that
> most changes are non-deliberate throughout their
> history.  We have very little evidence on this point.
> I first heard about people making their dialects
> more different from the dialect of the guys next door
> when I read Peter's Dialects in Contact.  But ever
> since I started giving talks here & there on deliberate
> change, people have come up with new examples for me;
> one such example was a case of deliberate dialect
> divergence from Peru -- the people told the
> fieldworker that they wanted to make sure they
> retained their differentness from the people just
> around the mountain from them, and so they deliberately
> distorted the pronunciation of their own words in
> a rule-governed way.
>
> I do still believe that most linguistic change must
> be non-deliberate.  That's the easiest way to account
> for (for instance) regular sound change.  But I
> also think that claims that the vast majority of
> linguistic change is subconscious are on shaky
> ground, as long as they lack evidence of any kind.
> (I admit that I haven't the faintest idea how one
> might go about gathering evidence.)

>
>   -- Sally Thomason


------------------------------

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End of Histling-l Digest, Vol 13, Issue 6
*****************************************

 

|||||   Henning Andersen

|||||   Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
|||||   University of California, Los Angeles
|||||   P.O.Box 951502
|||||   Los Angeles, CA 90095-1502

|||||   Phone: +1-310-837-6743.  Fax by appointment
|||||   http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/slavic/faculty/andersen_h.html

 

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