Acquisition & change: principles, concepts, explanations

The Routledge Handbook of Phonetics, 2019

MIT working papers, GLOW in ASIA 2017 proceedings, 2017

Can an imperceptibly tiny change in the relative ranking of a markedness constraint lead to phonemic instability and ultimately sound change in a language? In this paper we predict that this could indeed be the case when the phonological processes that take place within a certain morpho-phonological domain result in a particular phoneme being reinterpreted as marked by new learners of the language. According to McCarthy and Prince (1994), The Emergence of the Unmarked is a generalization about markedness constraints that are otherwise invisible in a language becoming visible in certain marked domains. While a markedness constraint C 'in the language as a whole, may be roundly violated, but in a particular domain it is obeyed exactly.' Now imagine the scenario where a markedness constraint C is ranked so low in the language that it is invisible for all practical purposes. However, when the satisfaction of a complex set of well-formedness constraints within a marked domain coincides with a systematic violation of C, it is possible for new learners of the language to re-rank C higher in the language. Thus the surface realization of phonological well-formedness conditions, if coincidentally localized to particular phonemes, rather than being distributed over a range of environments, could trigger phonemic instability and eventual sound change in the language. The Tibeto-Burman language Meiteilon, spoken in the state of Manipur in India, we claim, has a similar reanalysis taking place in its current phonological grammar. Meiteilon, like most other Tibeto-Burman languages of the region has rich inflectional morphology that attaches as suffixes to monosyllabic nominal or verbal roots. The second section of this paper is devoted to the discussion of a range of morpho-phonological processes that appear to be restricted to the domain of inflectional morphology in Meiteilon. A potential poster child for Strict Cyclicity

Beitrage Zur Geschichte Der Deutschen Sprache Und Literatur, 1999

This paper applies Rice's (1994) notion of "Peripherality" in Feature Geometry to sound change, employing it specifically to develop a markedness-based view of the spread of the High German Consonant Shift. Current work on the shift argues that the affrication/fricativization of voiceless stops began in position following short vowels, only later extending into other environments . The spread to initial, final, and post-consonantal positions was dialectally asymmetric with regard to place of articulation, however: Most commonly affected were the coronal stops, less the labials, least the velars.

AMSTERDAMER BEITRÄGE ZUR ÄLTEREN GERMANISTIK, 1996

Journal of Child Language, 2000

The appearance of ' filler syllables ' (called here PAEs, for Prefixed Additional Elements) in the late single-word period is analysed in relation to the emergence of grammatical morphemes, by confronting data from the longitudinal study of one child acquiring French, videorecorded between  ; . and  ; ., with four hypotheses making different claims about the kind of language knowledge underlying their production : the    - , the - , the   , and the     hypotheses. The pattern of results concerning the first two to three months' production of PAEs points to the existence of [*] This research was supported in part by the Fonds national suisse de la recherche scientifique (grants no. .- and no. .- to E. Veneziano and H. Sinclair).

The regularity principle in sound change -Approaching the Neogrammarian controversy in the 21 st century, Cologne, July 20 th -21 st 2017 1. Theoretical Preliminaries on the mechanisms of sound change (and its exceptions) The Neogrammarian model principally precludes irregular sound change. In a given language / dialect, a sound change operates without exceptions (s o u n d l a w ) for all positions of the sound in question (s p o n t a n e o u s s o u n d c h a n g e ) and conditioned, if at all, only by specific phonological and equally regular conditions (c o m b i n a t o r y / c o n d i t i o n e d s o u n d c h a n g e ).

Proceedings of NELS 45, 2015

raw. Thank you also to the audience at NELS 45, and several audiences at MIT and UCLA for many helpful comments. All mistakes herein are our own.

Historical Morphology, 1980

Yearbook of Morphology 1998, 1999