Substance-free phonology (SFP) is based on the hypothesis that phonological computation makes no reference to phonetic substance, and that phonological features are treated as arbitrary symbols for the purposes of computation. However, phonologists within the SFP tradition disagree about whether the content of phonological features is innate or learned (“emergent”), and if learned, whether the acquisition process is based on phonological patterning alone or refers to phonetic substance. In the present article we identify predictive differences between these accounts. We conclude that there is an innate basis to phonological features, but that featural content is not innate. We suggest that a hybrid phonetic-phonological approach to feature content acquisition may ultimately be the most successful.
No abstract
The sound change known as Osthoff’s Law, shortening a long vowel before a resonant-consonant cluster, was first explicitly described to have applied in the prehistory of Greek by Osthoff (1884). Since then, the existence of a similar sound change in Latin has been controversial in the literature, with claimed examples such as *vēntus > ventus ‘wind’. At one end, Simkin (2004) argues that Osthoff’s Law never took place in Latin; at the other, Weiss (2009) claims at least three independent rounds of Osthoff’s Law in the history of the Italic branch. I summarize the synchronic facts about pre-cluster vowel length in classical Latin using a comprehensive survey of the Latin lexicon, with a historical explanation for the vowel length in every form containing a cluster. I argue that Osthoff’s Law happened in Latin (contra Simkin), but only once (contra Weiss), around the 2nd century BCE.
Following the work of John Ohala, historical sound changes are thought to take place by misperception of the input on the part of the listener. Any account of sound change based on misperception, though, faces a paradox: if X sounds like Y, Y should also sound like X, and yet we often see sound changes that are only attested in one direction. A potential solution is to think of phonetic categories as distributions in acoustic space, and so asymmetries in sound change (X > Y, *Y > X) come from asymmetries in the spread of the distribution of X and Y. If X is a very variable phonetic category with a thick-tailed distribution, a high proportion of its tokens should cross the perceptual boundary and be misperceived as Y; if Y has a narrow distribution, only a very small proportion of its tokens should be perceived as X. We predict that unidirectional sound changes should involve a change from a high-variance to a low-variance category. This experiment tests a case study of asymmetric nasal place assimilation (VnpV > VmpV, *VmpV > VnpV) on a sample of six speakers in three vowel contexts. In the contexts aa and ii, the sequence np before the change had a higher-variance distribution of F2 transition (a cue to nasal place) than the sequence mp after the change. In uu, the sequence after the change had the higher variance. These results give partial support to our hypothesis.
The concept of 'markedness' has been influential in phonology for almost a century. Theoretical phonology used it to describe some segments as more 'marked' than others, referring to a cluster of language-internal and language-external properties (Jakobson, 1968;Haspelmath, 2006). We argue, using a simple mathematical model based on Evolutionary Phonology (EP; Blevins, 2004), that markedness is an epiphenomenon of phonetically grounded sound change.
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