24.1473, Review: Historical Linguistics; Phonology; Typology: Sol=?UTF-8?Q?=C3=A9_?=(2012)

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Subject: 24.1473, Review: Historical Linguistics; Phonology; Typology: Solé (2012)

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Date: Mon, 01 Apr 2013 11:37:48
From: Matthew Gordon [gordonmj at missouri.edu]
Subject: The Initiation of Sound Change

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/23/23-3334.html

EDITOR: Maria-Josep  Solé
EDITOR: Daniel  Recasens
TITLE: The Initiation of Sound Change
SUBTITLE: Perception, production, and social factors
SERIES TITLE: Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 323
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2012

REVIEWER: Matthew J. Gordon, University of Missouri

SUMMARY

This volume collects papers from a meeting, the Workshop on Sound Change, held
in Barcelona in 2010. The aim of that workshop, as the editors explain in the
forward to this volume, “was to bring together specialists from different
disciplines to examine how empirical data from a multiplicity of fields might
throw light on certain fundamental questions about the nature of sound change”
(vii). The papers published represent that cross-disciplinary conversation and
include work from scholars who specialize in phonetics, phonology, historical
linguistics, and other branches of the field. What all the papers share, in
addition to a focus on sound change, is a commitment to empirical
investigation, with many of the chapters reporting on experimental studies.

The eleven chapters are organized into three sections. Part I explores
“perception,” Part II deals with “production,” and Part III serves as a kind
of ‘elsewhere’ condition, with work examining “social factors, structural
factors and the typology of change.” As it happens, the papers do not strictly
abide by these divisions, and most consider the questions they explore from
various perspectives. In this way, the editors acknowledge the premise that
brought the scholars together in Barcelona: sound change is shaped by a range
of factors, and a fuller understanding comes from considering various
dimensions of the issue.

The editors set the table for the collection in their introductory chapter.
They note the field’s long-standing preoccupation with sound change and the
many ways that linguists have approached its study. They position the research
represented in their book as focused on the earliest stages of change, asking
how sound change is initiated and looking “at the roles played in this process
by variation in production, listener perceptions of such variation, the
phonological system, and the lexicon” (2). The introduction offers a useful
preview of the collection by summarizing the questions examined in each
chapter and drawing connections across those discussions. More unexpectedly,
the introduction also describes the discussions that the papers inspired when
they were presented at the workshop. These sessions were recorded and
“transcribed in full” (vii), allowing the editors to provide somewhat of a
play-by-play of those conversations, though, to be clear, this material has
been carefully edited and summarized  -- raw transcripts are not provided.
These Q&A sessions highlight key issues discussed and reinforce common threads
across various studies. Contributing further to their  value, the recaps of
the workshop discussion include comments from prominent scholars who were
present in Barcelona but do not have papers in this collection. Still, these
conversations are at times rather detailed in their consideration of the
papers presented at the workshop, and readers may appreciate them better if
they read them as postscript rather than preface to the main chapters.

Part 1 opens with John Ohala’s “The listener as source of sound change: An
update.” As the title reveals, this chapter represents a revision of the
author’s influential 1981 paper, and throughout, Ohala offers commentary that
illuminates the dominant lines of scholarship at the time of the original
paper’s appearance and how the field has (and has not) evolved since. Ohala’s
central argument remains intact. He begins with the observation that sound
change is less common than we might expect given the tremendous amount of
variation inherent in speech. By way of explanation, Ohala points to the
listener’s ability to correct for, or normalize variation “as long as they
have evidence or expectations of the environment or factors leading to the
variation” (25). Sound change, in Ohala’s view, arises when something goes
awry with that process of normalization, so that listeners either fail to
normalize when they should (his “hypocorrection”) or they do normalize when
they shouldn’t (his “hypercorrection”). In both scenarios, the role of
listeners in initiating sound change is primary. Variation may stem from
articulatory considerations but change results on the listener’s end.
Actually, as Ohala notes, his theory accounts equally well for changes that
arise from articulatory factors as for those that arise from “sounds having
similar acoustics without having much in common in articulation” (30).

Patrice Speeter Beddor follows Ohala with her “Perception grammars and sound
change,” which explores some of the same general territory related to
perceptual effects as a catalyst for sound change. Beddor focuses on
“overlapping articulatory events,” such as the lowering of velum during the
production of a vowel before a nasal consonant, and notes that they “have the
potential to be perceptually informative or disruptive” (38). In such cases,
the auditory signal may contain multiple cues about the sounds produced, and
Beddor is interested in how listeners process that information to arrive at an
interpretation of what they hear, that is, how their “perception grammars”
work to map the acoustic input to phonological forms (41). The chapter reports
on a series of experiments investigating the different weights that listeners
may assign to the various cues in the speech signal. Among the intriguing
results to emerge from this work is the finding that different listeners may
adopt different perceptual strategies. The same cue (e.g. vowel nasalization)
may vary in its perceptual effects from listener to listener. The research
delves further into this process by examining it in real time. Incorporating
eye-tracking methods into a categorization task allows Beddor and her
colleagues to track perception dynamically. This work too reveals “robustly
distinct perception grammars for different listeners” (50), and Beddor
connects these insights to contemporary thinking about the propagation of
language change.

In the third chapter of the section, Daniel Recasens, one of the volume’s
editors, examines “A phonetic interpretation of the sound changes affecting
dark /l/ in Romance.” While this work treats some of the same issues as those
in Beddor’s paper, the author draws on the richly documented history and
dialectology of the Romance family for evidence. The particular problem under
study is the vocalization of /l/, a change that appears to have taken
different phonetic paths in various languages. Recasens’s analysis shows how a
range of articulatory and acoustic factors are plausibly implicated in the
changes to /l/ in Romance, leading him to an account “based on an evaluation
of the relative prominence of cues in different contextual conditions on the
part of the listener” (72). He rejects the dominant approach, which seeks a
single phonetic source to explain a sound change. While the argument takes a
very different track from Beddor’s and Ohala’s, Recasens’s chapter articulates
a similar broad theme: the speech signal serves as a package of perceptual
cues that listeners may unwrap in different ways.

Michael Grosvald and David Corina remind us that listeners come with brains in
their chapter, “The production and perception of sub-phonemic vowel contrasts
and the roles of the listener in sound change.” They report on research using
electroencephalogram (EEG) data to measure listeners’ perception of vocalic
variation, in particular, variable realizations of schwa due to vowel-to-vowel
coarticulation across different distances. This approach opens a different
window on perception, as it does not require conscious actions of the
listener. The EEG measures brain activity while subjects passively hear
stimuli. In this study, the brain-wave evidence suggests that listeners are
sensitive to sub-phonemic differences of vowel quality within a certain range.
The researchers recorded their subjects in order to compare their production
with their perception. While they fail to find a statistical correlation here
-- subjects who show the most coarticulation in their own speech are not
necessarily more sensitive to it in perception  -- the work contributes useful
empirical insights for listener-centered theories of sound change, such as
Ohala’s.

Part II opens with Jonathan Harrington’s chapter, “The coarticulatory basis of
diachronic high back vowel fronting.” The paper looks into the well known
asymmetry along the front/back dimension of vowel space, as evidenced, for
example, by the fact that back vowels undergo fronting more frequently than
front vowels undergo retraction. Drawing together findings from previous
research, Harrington presents a detailed view of an active sound change: the
fronting of the high back vowels in Southern British English. The change is
driven by coarticulatory effects  -- fronting is most extreme when the vowels
in question are adjacent to coronal consonants  -- but, by comparing
perception data across two generations of speakers, Harrington documents how
coarticulation leads to a redrawing of a vowel’s target range.

The other editor, Maria-Josep Solé, also contributes a chapter titled “Natural
and unnatural patterns of sound change?” in which she takes on the common view
that some changes are more natural than others. Claims for naturalness are
usually drawn on a phonetic basis; a change that makes articulatory or
acoustic sense is taken to be natural. Solé challenges facile interpretations
of that phonetic basis, arguing that many “unnatural” sound changes derive
from the same phonetic principles behind “natural” changes. The chapter
examines several case studies where the difference between a common outcome
and an uncommon outcome stems from a minor adjustment of articulatory
gestures. Thus, rather than dividing changes in terms of naturalness, Solé
suggests “the only meaningful distinction is that between sound changes that
have a true phonetic basis… and changes triggered by non-phonetic factors such
as analogy, morphological or word-specific considerations, and dialect
contact” (141).

The section of production-focused chapters closes with Marianne Pouplier’s
“The gaits of speech: Re-examining the roles of articulatory effort in spoken
language.” Like Solé, Pouplier questions the received wisdom about the
phonetic basis of sound change, specifically, the idea that some innovations
result from a conservation of articulatory effort. We need to be careful in
assuming that one pronunciation requires more effort than another. Pouplier
argues particularly “that the sheer distance covered by the articulators or
number of gestures produced are inherently problematic as measures of
metabolic cost” (151). Tying together different strands of evidence from
articulatory studies of gestural coordination, she develops a theory of “gaits
of speech,” which holds that what constitutes an optimal articulation in terms
of energy consumption varies by speaking rate and other parameters (157). This
argument has important implications for general theories about the forces
shaping phonological systems over time, and Pouplier positions her work within
that discussion, with particular focus on Lindblom’s H&H Theory (e.g. 1990).

Part III begins with Joseph Salmons, Robert Fox, and Ewa Jacewicz’s “Prosodic
skewing of input and the initiation of cross-generational sound change.” In
their previous studies, this team has investigated “the warping of the vowel
space under more emphatic pronunciations” (168), finding parallels between the
shifting positions of vowels conditioned by prosodic prominence and the
trajectories the vowels take in certain active sound changes. The authors draw
on those parallels here, as they examine the question of how changes progress
across generations of speakers. They present findings from a study of some 400
speakers representing three dialects of American English and four age groups.
The picture that emerges suggests that each generation models its phonetic
targets on the emphatic pronunciation of their parents. Salmons and his
colleagues posit an account based in child-directed speech, which often
involves emphatic productions of words. Their intriguing suggestion may help
explain not only how particular vowels shift in particular dialects, but also
why vowel shifting is so common in English more generally.

Svetlin Dimov, Shira Katseff, and Keith Johnson blend experimental phonetics
and psychology as they explore “Social and personality variables in
compensation for altered auditory feedback.” Like several of their fellow
contributors to the volume, these authors are interested in why some hearers
appear to be more attuned to phonetic variation than others. They investigate
such differences by testing varying degrees of adjustment to “altered auditory
feedback” created by real-time resynthesis of the subjects’ speech. The
speakers hear their own voices through headphones, but the signal is altered
on the fly. Speakers tend to compensate for the alternation but vary in the
amount of such compensation. The researchers look for correlations between the
phonetic behavior of the subjects and certain personality traits measured
through standard questionnaire instruments. Their results highlight
personality characteristics that begin to sketch a profile of the person who
is exceptionally sensitive to phonetic variation, a type of speaker-hearer
believed to play a key role in the actuation of sound change.

Working within a usage-based framework, Joan Bybee examines “Patterns of
lexical diffusion and articulatory motivation for sound change.” She questions
the traditional dichotomy between Neogrammarian change and lexical diffusion
as framed, for example, by Labov (1981). In particular, she argues that
changes can be both phonetically and lexically gradual, citing several
examples in the literature of sound changes involving gradual phonetic shifts
that diffuse through the lexicon in stages. Such changes typically spread from
high to low frequency words, a pattern that is consistent with an articulatory
origin in the “automation of neuromotor routines” (217). Bybee challenges
perception-based accounts such as Ohala’s, but does not discount such effects
altogether. The general framework she presents highlights the diagnostic value
of lexical diffusion patterns for judging the causes of change.

The final contribution comes from Mark Hale, who considers “Foundational
concepts in the scientific study of sound change.” Hale focuses on two
“breakthroughs” in the study of sound change: (a) the Neogrammarian Hypothesis
of regularity; and (b) the “Phoneticist Hypothesis,” which he uses to
designate Ohala’s work, which seeks explanations for change in “explicit and
reasonable models of human phonetic parsing and production” (236). While the
literature teems with empirical support for both hypotheses, Hale notes that
they have not been brought together under a coherent theory of change. Drawing
on cases studies from English and Marshallese, he highlights limitations of
the Phoneticist approach that lead him to conclude that this model must be
expanded to consider “top-down” effects related to the transfer of
phonetically-motivated (re)analyses across phonological categories. In this
way, Hale presents a kind of blueprint for a key bridge between historical
linguistics and phonetics.

EVALUATION

Given the stature of the contributors, it comes as little surprise that the
quality of the scholarship contained in the volume is consistently high. The
authors are all experienced researchers, and many are leading figures in the
field who have been engaged with the questions at hand for decades. As the
summaries above indicate, the contributors put forward powerful arguments,
almost all of which are backed by innovative empirical studies. The
significance of these arguments shines through due to the care the authors
take to situate their work within the relevant broader scholarship. While each
chapter may take up a fairly narrow research question, that question is
helpfully framed in terms of larger issues. We see evidence of this in the
fact that most papers include three to five pages of references. As a result
of these efforts, the contributions speak to specialists within the particular
subfields as well as to linguists working in other areas.

Readers engaged in the study of sound change from outside the field of
phonetics may find especially useful the way that several papers challenge
commonly held assumptions. Solé’s discussion of naturalness stands as a fine
illustration of this tendency and, like others in the volume, this chapter
also highlights the value of thinking outside the traditional segmental box
and approaching sounds as sequences of gestures. Furthermore, non-specialist
readers are able to glimpse the cutting edge of laboratory phonetics
technology in, for example, Beddor’s incorporation of eye-tracking methods and
Grosvald and Corina’s use of EEG in speech perception studies. The real-time
speech synthesis used by Dimov, Katseff, and Johnson also opens new
possibilities for research, and, though not a technological innovation, their
exploration of psychological measures of personality represents an intriguing
cross-disciplinary step toward understanding the role of individuals in sound
change.

The collection as a whole stands as remarkably coherent. Common threads, such
as the role of perceptually sensitive individuals, run throughout several
papers, and the authors frequently reference work by their co-contributors. At
the same time, there is no significant redundancy in terms of the specific
research questions examined nor the broader lessons drawn in each chapter. The
editors are to be commended for their selection of papers and their work in
shaping the original workshop presentations for publication. The chapters have
further benefited from a peer-review process that seems to have improved the
clarity of the discussions and the overall coherence of the volume.

The editors succeeded in their goal of bringing scholars from various research
backgrounds into conversation. The papers represent a diversity of
methodologies and theoretical approaches. Still, the collection bears an
overwhelming emphasis on experimental phonetics. While the subtitle gives
equal weight to “perception, production, and social factors,” sociolinguistic
concerns receive relatively little attention. It is a missed opportunity that
the editors did not include more work with a “sociophonetic” emphasis,
especially given the explosive growth of this subfield in recent years (see,
e.g., Foulkes and Docherty 2006). In addition to broadening the theoretical
perspectives represented in the volume, such work could have expanded the
types of phenomena (and data) considered. Many of the papers in the collection
investigate coarticulatory phenomena, such as gestural overlap at
vowel-consonant transitions, and they do so by gathering speech data under
controlled laboratory conditions. Sociophonetic work, by contrast, has given
more attention to vocalic chain shifts and mergers, which are common in
varieties of English, and the data often come from conversational speech.

This quibble about what the volume does not contain should not overshadow the
value of what it does contain. The papers survey the state of the art in
empirical approaches to questions of how sound changes get their start. They
present a range of models for investigating those questions, and they chart a
rich theoretical landscape for understanding the results.

REFERENCES

Foulkes, Paul and Gerard Docherty. 2006. The social life of phonetics and
phonology Journal of Phonetics 34. 409-438.

Labov, William. 1981. Resolving the Neogrammarian controversy. Language 57.
267-309.

Lindblom, Björn. 1990. Explaining phonetic variation: A sketch of H and H
theory. In William J. Hardcastle & Alain Marchal (eds.), Speech production and
speech modelling, 403-439. Dordrecht: Kluwer.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Matthew J. Gordon is Associate Professor of English at the University of
Missouri-Columbia. His research examines sociolinguistic variation in American
English with a focus on the study of sound change in progress. He is the
author of Labov: A Guide for the Perplexed (2013, Bloomsbury) and co-author
with Lesley Milroy of Sociolinguistics: Method and Interpretation (2003,
Blackwell).








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