37.3525, Confs: Workshop at ICHL28: Low-level and Experimental Phonetics in Historical Phonology (Iceland)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3525. Tue 27 Oct 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3525, Confs: Workshop at ICHL28: Low-level and Experimental Phonetics in Historical Phonology (Iceland)

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Date: 25-Oct-2026
From: Lorenzo Maselli [maselli.lorenzo at tufs.ac.jp]
Subject: Workshop at ICHL28: Low-level and Experimental Phonetics in Historical Phonology


Workshop at ICHL28: Low-level and Experimental Phonetics in Historical
Phonology
Short Title: ICHL28
Theme: Low-level and Experimental Phonetics in Historical Phonology

Date: 26-Jul-2027 - 30-Jul-2027
Location: Reykjavík, Iceland
Contact: Lorenzo Maselli
Contact Email: maselli.lorenzo at tufs.ac.jp
Meeting URL:
https://ichl28.hi.is/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/W11_Low-level_and_Experimental_Phonetics_in_Historical_Phonology.pdf

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; History of Linguistics;
Phonetics; Phonology

Submission Deadline: 01-Dec-2026

Abstracts should be submitted via EasyAbs:
https://easyabs.linguistlist.org/conference/ICHL28/
Prospectives participants will be able to select this workshop (W11)
during the submission process
Abstracts should include a descriptive title, main text and
references. The maximum length for the abstract (excluding references)
is 500 words. Papers can be submitted to a workshop or directly to the
General Session. A paper submitted to a workshop but not accepted
there may be considered for the General Session instead.
Workshop 11 "Low-level and Experimental Phonetics in Historical
Phonology" (co-convenors: Dr. Lorenzo Maselli, Prof. Dr. Sara
Pacchiarotti)
The relationship between phonetics and historical phonology has
changed over decades of scientific linguistic investigation (Ohala
2017). In pre-structuralist and early structuralist thought, phonetics
was primarily associated with diachrony and sound change (Osthoff &
Brugmann 1878, Trubetzkoy 1939, Lehmann 1967, Jankowsky 1999) and was
largely not treated as a potentially autonomous sub-discipline of
linguistics (with some exceptions, notably Sievers 1881, Rousselot
1891). Saussure’s (1916) seminal distinction between what we now call
phonology as the organisation of paradigms in a synchronic system and
phonetics as their physical implementation susceptible to change in
time did not challenge this post-Neogrammarian conception (Kiparsky
1974, Murray 2015).
The establishment of experimental and quantitative phonetics from the
mid-twentieth century onwards considerably expanded the scope of the
relationship between diachronic phonology and phonetics proper
(Malmberg 1969, Ohala 1974, Mann & Repp 1981, Beddor et al. 1986,
Kohler 2000, Stuart-Smith 2004). Low-level and instrumental approaches
have provided new ways of addressing old questions in historical
phonology, while the emergence of Laboratory Phonology and
Articulatory Phonology (Kingston & Beckman 1990, Browman & Goldstein
1992, Pierrehumbert et al. 2000) has blurred the boundary between
phonetic and phonological analysis. Phonetics has moved beyond
providing evidence for independently formulated historical hypotheses:
fine-grained acoustic, articulatory, and aerodynamic data can show
patterns of variation and thereby contribute to developing new
hypotheses about sound change (Janda & Joseph 2003, Demolin 2005).
Part of this epistemological turn revolves around what Kiparsky (2015)
calls “the constraints problem,” i.e. whether plausible sound changes
should be grounded in “phonetic naturalness,” despite challenges to
this teleological view (Zhang 2004, Blust 2005, Blevins 2007, 2008).
Work on the origins and development of tone (Haudricourt 1954,
Thurgood 2002; see also Öhman 1967) or labial-velar articulations in
African languages (Connell 1998/1999, Maselli et al. 2023) provide a
couple of examples of research resulting from this turn, but several
more can be found.
This workshop aims to bring together researchers interested in
phonetically informed historical linguistics. We particularly invite
work using instrumental methods to investigate diachronic phonology
from a synchronic-phonetic perspective, especially in underdescribed
and minority languages / language groups. The workshop is interested
in the following research questions:
 - What is “phonetic naturalness” in sound change? How can low-level
and experimental phonetics contribute to diachronic-phonological
analyses based on the notion of “phonetic naturalness?”
 - Is there a shared basis for defining “phonetic naturalness” across
language families? Or are there genetic/genealogical/geographical
constraints on what is considered phonetically natural in sound
change?
 - Should sound change always be (phonetically) motivated?
 - How do available phonetic analyses fare in accounting for sound
changes considered “unusual?”
 - How can competing historical-comparative hypotheses about sound
change be informed by low-level phonetic studies?
 - Can low-level phonetic studies help formulate hypotheses about
sound change?
We particularly encourage prospective speakers to submit:
 - Contributions on attested phonetic pathways of sound change that
bear on the question of “phonetic naturalness;”
 - Contributions on phonetic analyses of unusual or hard-to-motivate
sound changes;
 - Studies of synchronic variation as evidence for diachronic
processes;
 - Articulatory, acoustic, aerodynamic, or other instrumental-phonetic
analyses of historical-linguistic questions;
 - Studies of tonogenesis and other processes of sound-system change
triggered by identifiable articulatory dynamics;
 - Contributions presenting experimental-phonetic and -phonological
approaches to language reconstruction;
 - Historical-linguistic contributions that adopt an explicit
laboratory-phonological or articulatory-phonological framework;
 - Historiographical appraisals of the within-discipline debate about
the themes of this workshop.
We welcome contributions from any framework and on any language
family, but especially encourage those on lesser known languages
and/or less represented geographical regions.


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