Neogrammarian vs. other sound change

[Andrew Garrett]

While I am disposed by training and impulse to agree fully with Brian's 
comments, about the distinction between Neogrammarian sound change (or 
sound change proper) and other types of changes in sounds, I think the 
jury is actually still out on one crucial question. This is the question 
of precisely when regularity actually emerges in the series of unfolding 
events that we retrospectively see as Neogrammarian sound change. The 
view that was maybe implicit in some Neogrammarians' thinking, and that 
I have taught from time to time, is that the regularity effect arises in 
innovation and not in diffusion -- for example, that the very first 
person to have a changed pronunciation will (presumably) vary in whether 
s/he uses the changed pronunciation on any particular occasion, but that 
it will be just as likely to appear in all words that conform to the 
relevant phonological generalization. An alternative view is that the 
first person to have a changed pronunciation really does use it only in 
one word but not in other words that are phonologically equivalent, and 
that the regularity effect arises somehow in the process of 
sociolinguistic diffusion, i.e. as the phonetic effect (sound change) 
acquires some sociolinguistic traction. This view was propounded as 
early as 1901 by Benjamin Ide Wheeler (a Neogrammarian student and 
incidentally at the time the President of the University of California); 
the obvious disadvantage of this view is that it becomes unclear why we 
should (at least usually) encounter the regularity effect, but it's a 
view that finds a congenial home in much present-day sociophonetics. To 
my mind, the question remains unresolved.

The relevance of the question is that if Neogrammarian sound change, 
i.e. the regularity effect, only arises in the course of sociolinguistic 
diffusion, then it is not so clear that there is actually a meaningful 
distinction between Neogrammarian sound change and socially driven 
change (assuming that we allow the latter to be "unconscious"). Indeed, 
Wheeler's own explanation of the regularity effect invoked precisely 
what Sally referred to as correspondence rules (borrowing routines): his 
idea was that (say) you produce a fronted /u/ in just one word, for 
example "cool", I hear that fronted /u/ in your speech and I know it 
corresponds to a non-fronted /u/ in my speech, I think you're worth 
imitating, and I generalize a pattern whereby non-fronted /u/ 
corresponds to fronted /u/ more generally. This approach also has 
obvious analogs in more recent Labovian work. I don't mean to say that I 
agree with this analysis, but it strikes me that we don't yet know where 
the truth lies.

-- Andrew

Andrew Garrett
UC Berkeley
> ------------------------------
>
> 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

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