Diachronica - Volume 25, Issue 1, 2008

Blust (2005, 2007a, 2007b) questions the phonetic motivation of a number of well-attested sound changes. One sound change in this class is the purported case of stressed vowel syncope in Mussau, an Oceanic language (Blust 1984, 2001, 2007a). Regular syncopes typically target unstressed vowels. By contrast, loss of stressed vowels is difficult to motivate, due to their inherent prominence. Close inspection of Mussau historical phonology suggests that, at its origins, syncope was limited to unstressed vowels, with subsequent developments obscuring its original phonetic motivation. Under the proposed analysis, the Neogrammarian insistence on phonetically motivated sound change is maintained.

Modern Colloquial Welsh (MCW) displays a considerable variety of tag question patterns. In this paper we offer a unified account for the divergent developments in modern Welsh dialects, focusing on tags attached to “normal” or VSO clauses. We propose a scenario of how the MCW system of tags is descended from the pre-modern system by processes of reanalysis and grammaticalization. We show that South Walian dialects have elaborated a system of tag questions in which the tag reverses the polarity of the anchor to which it is attached, while North Walian dialects have followed a principle of constant polarity in which tags anticipate the polarity of the expected response.

This article aims to define the phonological structure of Proto-Bantu lexical units on the basis of frequencies of reconstructed consonant co-occurrences. Starting from the main reconstructions given in BLR3, I present evidence for the presence of unexpected frequencies indicating imbalances in two directions. Certain consonant co-occurrences have not been reconstructed, essentially consonants sharing the same place of articulation and differing by only one feature, either voicing or nasality. These “gaps” in the proto-lexicon turn out to correspond to more general constraints that tend, on the one hand, towards the differentiation of place of articulation and, on the other hand, on agreement in voicing and nasality. However, in cases where *C1 and *C2 share the same place of articulation, Proto-Bantu seems to prefer identity over similarity. In looking to establish a link between the phonotactic constraints of the mother language and those of daughter languages, the latter take different directions, either a direction identical to that of the mother language, or a divergent one. In the reconstructions, the constraints on the nasality feature show similarities to those present in contemporary languages: Ganda has extended the constraint reconstructed for alveolars to all co-occurrences between a voiced stop and a nasal with the same place of articulation. However, the constraints on voicing generated by the dissimilation rule known as Dahl’s Law go in a divergent direction. I bring support here for the view that Dahl’s Law is in fact a daughter-language innovation. Furthermore, I show that this innovation was probably induced by the imbalances of the mother language; the rule fills Proto-Bantu distributional gaps. Finally, I discuss the implications of this study for the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP).