third component in a "change"

[Wright, Roger]

A third necessary component (if it really is a "change") is for the previous feature with the same or similar function to drop out of use. This usually happens some time after the arrival of the new feature, and the period when both old and new features coincide can last for a long time, both being used and both being understood; and the variation doesn't need to be resolved necessarily at all. And even if it is, it can be the new feature that drops out, not the old. Maybe we should stop talking about changes at all, and concentrate on the arrival (linguistically explicable innovation and socially explicable spread) of new features; and study the loss of old features also if need be, but as a separate phenomenon   -  RW
 
 

 
________________________________

From: histling-l-bounces at mailman.rice.edu on behalf of Sally Thomason
Sent: Mon 1/28/2008 3:45 PM
To: histling-l at mailman.rice.edu
Subject: Re: [Histling-l] 'reversed change' and 'deliberate change' 




Henning Andersen's distinction is appealing, but the problem
I was talking about remains: how can we know, after the fact
and without documentary evidence, whether a given change was
"true sound change" or "socially driven" change?  I am
increasingly convinced that the answer to this question is, we
*can't* know -- in part because every linguistic change has both
linguistic and social components.

Part of the difference between me and Henning (and maybe between
me and Brian as well) is that I don't think there is a
"distinction between innovation and change" -- although  Henning's
view is certainly shared by at least some others, e.g. Lesley and
Jim Milroy.  I believe that any linguistic change, by which I
mean change in a language (or dialect) has two necessary components:
the innovation and the spread of the innovation through the speech
community (including through the/an innovator's speech).  I have seen
assertions to the effect that the innovation is the change, and assertions
to the effect that the spread is the change, but I've never seen any
actual arguments to support the view that we have to decide which
of these two processes should be given pride of place as "the change". 
To me it seems awfully obvious: no innovation, no spread; no spread, no
completed change.  You need both; neither, by itself, will get you a
linguistic change.  And the spread of any innovation has an irreducible
social dimension (in some cases many social dimensions).

So I believe that any effort to separate out the social aspect(s) of a
change, treating only the linguistic aspect(s) OR only the social aspect(s)
as "the change", is doomed.  Deliberate changes that one can establish because
of explicit metalinguistic evidence are the most spectacular cases I know of,
but I don't think they are all different in kind from subconscious changes
(though a few of them, like the massive gender reversal reported for a
non-Austronesian language spoken on Bougainville Island, may be different in
kind).  And if deliberate changes are sometimes, often, or usually similar or
identical, in retrospect, to (presumably) subconscious changes, what exactly
justifies our traditional belief that the vast majority of changes, including
sound changes, is/are entirely subconscious?

Henning's image of all members of a speech community deliberately talking in
lock-step is amusing, but -- sorry to complicate things further -- I see no
reason why processes of change should be either all deliberate or all subconscious.
I bet some of the people in F.K. Lehman's example reintroduced those consonants
deliberately, while some of them just imitated others who were pronouncing
them, without noticing what they were doing.  But I don't buy the idea that
the linguist has to have "positive evidence" of deliberate change before
suggesting that it might have been a factor.  (They used to say that about
contact-induced change, as oppposed to internally-motivated change: internal
sources of change were considered the default.  You don't hear that so much
any more.)  Maybe the potential impact of social factors on "sound change
proper" will eventually turn out to be supported by enough evidence to topple
the comfortable assumption that it's awfully rare.

   -- Sally

   (Sally Thomason, Univ. of Michigan)
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