Exaptation and phonological change

Lexical Storage and Phonological Change

Empirical investigations of the division of labour between storage and computation in language behaviour can be executed in a number of ways. An obvious one is that of psycholinguistic experimentation. Another way, which will be focused on in this paper, is language change: language change is a psycholinguistic laboratory of nature, a window on how speakers produce and interpret language. For e...

Language acquisition and phonological change

Grammont discusses changes in the development of French from Latin, citing examples of similar patterns in the speech of one child. For instance, the child displayed vowel dissimilation in forms like néni for fini ‘finished’, paralleling historical developments such as Latin finire  Old French fenir ‘to finish’. While Schleicher and Grammont stop short of imputing direct causality, explicit co...

Phonological Change in Cincinatti

Phonological Change in Cincinnati

Labov, Sound Change, and Phonological Theory

Labov begins his landmark Principles of Linguistic Change with a volume on internal factors governing sound change (Labov 1994) that focuses on the CONSTRAINTS PROBLEM (Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog 1968): what changes are possible for a language in a given state? On the basis of typological data on sound changes and his research on ongoing change in English, he puts forward a set of principled ...