Grammatically Conditioned Sound Change

In the first half of the 20th century following the Neogrammarian tradition, most researchers believed that sound change was always conditioned by phonetic phenomena and never by grammar. Beginning in the 1960s, proponents of the generative school put forward cases of grammatically conditioned sound change. From then until now, new cases have continued to come to light. A close look at the development of intervocalic -sin Greek, reveals the divergent approach of the two schools of thought. All examples of grammatical conditioning are amenable to explanation as some combination of regular sound change, analogy, or borrowing. Neither the Neogrammarian belief in exceptionless phonetically conditioned sound change nor the generative inspired belief in grammatical conditioning is a falsifiable hypothesis. Because of its assumptions are more parsimonious and its descriptive power more subtle, the Neogrammarian position is the more appealing of these two equally unprovable doctrines. crede ut intelligas St. Augstine of Hippo Grammatical Conditioning, Achievement of the Generative School According to Johnson, one, of the achievements of the generative school of phonology has been to point out the theoretical importance of the existence of a number of cases of sound changes which have morphological exceptions (1982: 171); one can imagine, for example, a language that changes intervocalic -sto -hexcept where -sis a tense marker. Postal (1968) and King (1969) may take credit for initiating the attention given to such phenomena. Postal (1968: 236–39) quotes from eight authors’writing between 1952 and 1964 who agree with the Neogrammarian position that sound change is always only phonetically conditioned, tracing this school of thought form Paul (1888) via L. Bloomfield (1933) (cf. Postal 1968: 235–36, 239). In contrast to this tradition, Postal himself believes that some ‘regular phonetic changes take place in environments whose specification requires reference to nonphonetic morphophonemic and/or superficial grammatical structure’ (1968: 240). King speculates that it is unlikely that ‘morphologically conditioned phonological changes are rare in the world’s languages’ (1969: 124). Only four years after the publication of Postal’s study, Labov finds that there ‘is now a large body of empirical evidence which contradicts the Neogrammarian notion that only phonetic factors influence sound change, and no reasonable person can proceed from the older assumption’ (1972: 108–09). In the same year Anttila admonishes that to ‘deny grammatical conditioning implies that only hearers are allowed to create change – not speakers, who come to sound through the rest of the grammar’ (1972: 78, 1989: 78). In our day, the generative view is the new orthodoxy. Crowley and Bowern remark that ‘some languages do, in fact, provide evidence that at least some sound changes apply only in certain WORD CLASSES (or parts of speech) and not in others’ (2010: 171 emphasis in original). Carstairs-McCarthy concludes succinctly that it ‘is not the case that grammar is powerless to resist sound-change’ (2010: 51). Enger marvels that it ‘is testimony to the strength of the Neogrammarian tradition that this point has to be made again and again’ (2013: 14). © 2014 The Author Language and Linguistics Compass © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd