Neogrammarian vs. other sound change

[Emmon Bach]

bjoseph at ling.ohio-state.edu wrote:
> Andrew is absolutely right that there is the one remaining issue still 
> to be resolved.  At the risk of sounding self-serving, let me say that 
> Rich Janda and I gave an answer to this (at least implicitly) in our 
> 2003 paper on a "'big bang' model of sound change" (published in the 
> Benjamins volume arising out of the 2001 ICHL in Melbourne, edited by 
> Barry Blake and Kate Burridge).  We located regularity in the initial 
> onset of a sound change, where phonetic factors are paramount.  We 
> envision that as relatively brief (hence the parallel to the "Big 
> Bang" in physics) and after that, extensions along a number of 
> parameters are possible.  One is further phonetic generalization (thus 
> giving regularity of broader scope than at the initial "big bang" (and 
> generalization to a broader set of input sounds is also possible), but 
> lexical, grammatical, or social lines of generalization can be 
> followed.  To our way of thinking, the crucial thing about sound 
> change proper is the phoneticity -- with conditions that are purely 
> phonetic in nature (which we envision as the essential starting point, 
> the "big bang") regularity follows automatically since that is the 
> most elemental and the most broadly applicable type of conditioning.  
> Once the forces of generalization set in post-big bang (assuming they 
> do -- they need not), phoneticity can disappear, and there is no 
> guarantee of regularity (though it could occur, as noted with regard 
> to hypercorrection and other sorts of rule-governed behavior).
>
> --Brian
>
> Brian D. Joseph
> The Ohio State University
>
> Quoting Andrew Garrett <garrett at berkeley.edu>:
>
>> 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
>>>
>>> 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
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Histling-l mailing list
>> Histling-l at mailman.rice.edu
>> https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/histling-l
>
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Histling-l mailing list
> Histling-l at mailman.rice.edu
> https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/histling-l
Dear All,

I think the paper Bob Harms and I wrote aeons ago is relevant to some of 
this discussion.

Cheers to all, Emmon

-- 
Professor Emmon Bach
22 Coniston Rd
London N10 2BP
UK
home telephone: (0)20 8444 4647
SOAS telephone:  (0)20 7898 4593

-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: crazy.txt
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/histling-l/attachments/20080130/510aecf5/attachment.txt>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
Histling-l mailing list
Histling-l at mailman.rice.edu
https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/histling-l