No abstract

All languages use individually meaningless, contrastive categories in combination to create distinct words. Despite their central role in communication, these "phoneme" contrasts can be lost over the course of language change. The century-old functional load hypothesis proposes that loss of a phoneme contrast will be inhibited in relation to the work that it does in distinguishing words. In a previous work we showed for the first time that a simple measure of functional load does significantly predict patterns of contrast loss within a diverse set of languages: the more minimal word pairs that a phoneme contrast distinguishes, the less likely those phonemes are to have merged over the course of language change. Here, we examine several lexical properties that are predicted to influence the uncertainty between word pairs in usage. We present evidence that (a) the lemma rather than surface-form count of minimal pairs is more predictive of merger; (b) the count of minimal lemma pairs that share a syntactic category is a stronger predictor of merger than the count of those with divergent syntactic categories, and (c) that the count of minimal lemma pairs with members of similar frequency is a stronger predictor of merger than that of those with more divergent frequencies. These findings support the broad hypothesis that properties of individual utterances influence long-term language change, and are consistent with findings suggesting that phonetic cues are modulated in response to lexical uncertainty within utterances.

This paper argues that neutralizing phonological alternations are sensitive to how much homophony they create among distinct lexical items: neutralizing rules create fewer homophones than expected. Building on a case study of Korean by Silverman (2010), I compare the neutralizing rules of Korean to a large number of hypothetical alternatives generated by Monte Carlo simulations. The simulations reveal that the actual rules of Korean frequently create far fewer homophones than similar (but unattested) rules, even when the rules that are compared are controlled for the number of phonemic contrasts they eliminate. These results suggest that phonological patterns are sensitive not only to high-level contrasts among phonemes but also to contrasts among individual lexical items. The effect is most pronounced when homophones are not weighted by frequency, a result that adds to evidence in the literature that the relevant measure of lexical frequency for many lexicon-sensitive phonological patterns is type frequency, not token frequency.

Quantitative constraint-based theories of optionality typically aim to model the frequency with which an individual speaker's grammar maps one input onto various output forms. But existing studies in this area use population-level frequency data as a proxy for the frequencies produced by an individual speaker's grammar. This practice is problematic for three reasons. First, population-level variation could result from aggregation over individuals with differing categorical behavior, not individual variation at all. Second, some theories predict that individuals with identical relative constraint rankings/weights can produce those outputs with different frequencies, while others predict uniform frequencies across speakers; these prediction cannot be tested without individual-level data. Third, if indeed individuals differ in their output frequencies, population-level averages may disguise true patterns of individual variation. This paper addresses these shortcomings through a corpus study of optional schwa deletion in French. We find that individual speakers do in fact show variable omission of schwa. We also find variation between speakers in the frequency of schwa's appearance. Taken together, these results confirm that for French schwa, formal theories are correct to ascribe variation to a single speaker's grammar, and they favor theories that decouple the means of producing variation from the account of output frequency.

Many languages have been claimed to have phonological patterns that are sensitive to the need to avoid homophony -for example, a rule that is blocked if it would create a surface form that is identical to another word in the language. Such patterns always involve comparisons between words in the same morphological paradigm (e.g., singular and plural forms with the same stem). The lone exception to this generalization is Ichimura (2006), who argues that a nasal contraction pattern in Japanese is blocked by potential homophony between verbs with different stems. We present experimental evidence that homophony avoidance is not part of the correct synchronic description of the environment in which this pattern applies; rather, nasal contraction does not productively delete stem-final vowels. However, homophony avoidance does appear to affect the probability with which contraction applies. We conclude that homophony avoidance affects phonological behavior, but that absolute homophony-related blocking is restricted to morphological paradigms.