Diachronic evidence for synchronic analyses in phonology

Money Pumps, Diachronic and Synchronic

Physical Emergence, Diachronic And Synchronic

This paper explicates two notions of emergence which are based on two ways of distinguishing levels of properties for dynamical systems. Once the levels are defined, the strategies of characterizing the relation of higher level to lower level properties as diachronic and synchronic emergence are the same. In each case, the higher level properties are said to be emergent if they are ‘novel’ or ‘...

Pejoratives and Relevance: Synchronic and Diachronic Issues

The paper considers a possible relevantist treatment, in the spirit of Wilson and Sperber’s work, of pejoratives and argues for three claims concerning them. On the level of synchronic issues it suggests that the negative content of pejoratives, at least in its minimal scope, is the normal part of their lexical meaning, and not a result of extra-semantic enrichment. It thus suggests an evaluati...

A Complexity Measure for Diachronic Chinese Phonology

This paper addresses the problem of deriving distance measures between parent and daughter languages with specific relevance to historical Chinese phonology. The diachronic relationship between the languages is modelled as a Probabilistic Finite State Automaton. The Minimum Message Length principle is then employed to find the complexity of this structure. The idea is that this measure is repre...

Evidence for a relationship between synchronic variability and diachronic change in the Queen’s annual Christmas broadcasts

The present study was designed to test whether phonetic sound change can take place within an individual beyond the critical age and, if so, whether it is gradual. An acoustic analysis was made of /u/-fronting and /æ/-lowering which are both sound changes that have occurred in the standard accent of England in the last fifty years. The speech data were taken from the messages that have been bro...