'reversed change' and 'deliberate change'

Sun Jan 27 20:26:01 UTC 2008

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fall into disuse, superseded by the borrowed, more widely used, more 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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