DIACHRONIC MEASUREMENTS OF SYNCHRONIC RESEARCHES

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...

Synchronic vs. Diachronic Naturalness: Hyman & Schuh (1974) revisited

In this paper I present and update some of the major points Russell Schuh and I made in our 1974 Linguistic Inquiry paper concerning universals of tone rules. Emphasis is on the distinction we made between synchronic and diachronic naturalness. Any diachronic change can be a synchronic rule while the reserve is not the case. We suggest(ed) that it is profitable to talk about natural synchronic ...

Preaspiration in the Nordic Languages Synchronic and diachronic aspects

Preaspiration — the production of glottal friction at the juncture of a vowel and a consonant — appears to be typologically rare but is an areal linguistic feature of Northwestern Europe. This study contains a survey of the known geographical spread of preaspirated stops, their phonological distribution and phonetic expressions in some Nordic dialects. The study also suggests a reconstruction o...