Patterns of contrast in phonological change: Evidence from Algonquian vowel systems

Abstract

This article proposes that patterns of phonological contrast should be added to the list of factors that influence sound change. It adopts a hierarchically determined model of contrast that allows for a constrained degree of crosslinguistic variation in contrastive feature specifications. The predictions of this model are tested against a database comprising the set of vowel changes in the Algonquian languages. The model reveals striking commonalities in the underlying sources of these changes and straightforwardly predicts the previously unrecognized patterning of the languages into two groups: (i) those in which */ɛ/ tends to merge with */i/ and palatalization is triggered by */i/, and (ii) those in which */ɛ/ tends to merge with */a/ and palatalization is triggered by */ɛ/. In addition to providing a new argument for the relevance of contrast to phonology, the model also gives us a way to import traditional philological findings into a framework that brings them to bear on theoretical questions.

Marginal contrasts and the Contrastivist Hypothesis

“…For example, voicing is contrastive on obstruents but predictable on sonorants in Japanese (as in many other languages), and Japanese rendaku, which voices the initial consonant of the second member of a compound, is blocked by the presence of another voiced obstruent, but not by sonorants (Itô & Mester 1986). Accordingly, many phonologists have proposed that redundant features are omitted from some or all of the phonological computation, or that contrastive features have some special status (e.g., Kiparsky 1982a;Archangeli 1984;Itô & Mester 1986;Clements 1987;Pulleyblank 1988;Avery & Rice 1989;Piggott 1992;Dresher et al 1994;Itô et al 1995;Calabrese 1995;2005;Dyck 1995;Ghini 2001;Hall 2007;2011b;Dresher 2009;2015;Mackenzie 2009;2013;Nevins 2010;2015;Iosad 2012;Oxford 2015); see Hall (2011a;forthcoming) for a concise overview and Dresher (2009) for a more detailed one. Hall (2007) formulates the Contrastivist Hypothesis as in (1): (1) Contrastivist Hypothesis (Hall 2007: 20) The phonological component of a language L operates only on those features which are necessary to distinguish the phonemes of L from one another.…”

“…In the context of the SDA, a contrast might be considered 'marginal' if it is relatively low in the contrastive hierarchy, particularly if it appears on only a small number of branches. Contrasts with low scope might, in turn, be expected to be diachronically unstable-either emerging or disappearing (Dresher et al 2014;Oxford 2015)-and synchronically more susceptible to neutralization (Spahr 2014). Similarly, but potentially independently, contrasts with low entropy may offer less evidence to the learner, and consequently also be diachronically precarious.…”

Decomposing hierarchical alignment: Co-arguments as conditions on alignment and the limits of referential hierarchies as explanations in verb agreement

“…The input to the algorithm is a set of occurrences of agreement affixes with the indication of their respective slots and their co-arguments in the way illustrated for the Plains Cree prefixes ki-and ni-in Table 3 above. (For expository purposes, Table 3 only represents the person feature, but the Goddard (1994) and Oxford (2015). Subgroups are labeled by the numbers specifying innovations in Oxford (2015).…”

“…(For expository purposes, Table 3 only represents the person feature, but the Goddard (1994) and Oxford (2015). Subgroups are labeled by the numbers specifying innovations in Oxford (2015).…”

“…The Kiranti tree is based on the summary in Bickel and Gaenszle (2015). For Algonquian we test our hypothesis both on a flat tree that is traditionally posited (e. g., Mithun 1999) and a more structured tree that we construct on the basis of shared innovations that have developed in a west-to-east cline (Goddard 1994;Oxford 2015). In each tree, all branches have length 1 between the nodes that are posited in the literature even when the nodes are not relevant for our sample.…”