Printer friendly version

Li11 Historical linguistics Explanation in sound change

Essay titles
1. Assess the merits of the various explanations for phonological change that have been proposed. 2. To what extent can sound change (phonetic change) be distinguished from phonological change?

Reading
The main historical linguistics textbooks all have chapters or sections on sound change, which also look at explanations for change. See the general course reading list for these. You should begin with some of these. The sections marked here are those on explanation in sound change, but you may also need to look at (generally earlier) overviews of what sound change is, and what types of sound change there are:

Campbell, chapter 11 Hock & Joseph, pp. 143-52 Hock, chapter 20 Lehmann, pp. 207-15 McMahon, Introduction and chapter 2 Three views of sound change Trask, chapter 4

For more specific reading, take a look at: Andersen, Henning. 1973. Abductive and deductive change. Language 49: 765-93. Forner, Monika; Jeanette K. Gundel; Kathleen Houlihan; & Gerald Sanders. 1992. On the historical development of marked forms. In Explanation in historical linguistics, edited by Garry W. Davis and Gregory K. Iverson. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 7793. [Investigates how languages can gain marked (mostly phonological) options, arguing that they can only be introduced by adults, either through borrowing from another language, or through fast speech phenomena.] Greenlee, Mel & John J. Ohala. 1980. Phonetically motivated parallels between child phonology and historical sound change. Language Sciences 2: 283-308. Labov, William. 1994. Principles of linguistic change. Oxford: Blackwell, parts B (and C).

* Lucas, Peter J. 1991. Some aspects of the historical development of English consonant phonemes. Transactions of the Philological Society 89: 37-64. McMahon, April. 2000. Lexical phonology and the history of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ohala, John J. 1981. The listener as a source of sound change. In Papers from the Parasession on Language and Behavior. Chicago Linguistics Society, May 1-2, 1981, edited by C. S. Masek, R. A. Hendrick and M. F. Miller. Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society, 178-203. * Ohala, John J. 1993. The phonetics of sound change. In Historical linguistics: Problems and perspectives, edited by Charles Jones, 237-78. Longman: London. Phillips, Betty S. 1984. Word frequency and the actuation of sound change. Language 60: 32042. Weinreich, Uriel, William Labov, & Marvin I. Herzog. 1968. Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In Directions for historical linguistics, edited by W. Lehman and Y. Malkiel. Austin: University of Texas Press, 95-195. A good example of a phonological change (as opposed to a sound change) is English linking / intrusive /r/. For details, look at: Cho, Young-Mee Yu. 1998. Language change as reranking of constraints. In Historical linguistics 1995: Selected papers from the 12th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Manchester, August 1995, edited by Richard M. Hogg and Linda van Bergen, 45-62. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. [An attempt to characterise the development of intrusive /r/ an a reranking of constraints within Optimality Theory, assuming that all varieties of English have the same underlying representations.] * McMahon, April. 2000. Lexical phonology and the history of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, esp. pp. 231-50. If you have difficulty with any terms in phonetics and phonology, there are useful sections in Hock (1986) chapter 2 and Sihler (2000: 209-37). You could also look at one of the general phonetics textbooks: Clark, John, & Colin Yallop. 1990. An introduction to phonetics and phonology. Oxford: Blackwell. Ladefoged, Peter. 1993. A course in phonetics. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers. or use a general dictionary of linguistic terms: Crystal, David. 1990. A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics. 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.

Crystal, David. 1992. An encyclopedic dictionary of language and languages. Oxford: Blackwell. Trask, R. L. 1993. A dictionary of grammatical terms in linguistics. London: Routledge. Trask, R. L. 2000. The dictionary of historical and comparative linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Back to list of supervisions | Home
David Willis 2010 Last update: 27 April 2010

http://www.ling.cam.ac.uk/li7/sound_change.htm