Diachronica - Volume 29, Issue 2, 2012

Textbook treatments generally state that primary split, or split-merger leads to positional neutralization, but has no effect on phoneme inventory. However, if the phonemes affected by a primary split have a defective distribution at the time of the change the result may be loss of contrast, or inventory reduction. This potential is illustrated with artificial data, but involves no assumptions that are contrary to common types of sound change.

Using a corpus of Medieval Spanish text, we examine factors affecting the Modern Standard Spanish outcome of the initial /f/ in Latin FV‑ words. Regression analyses reveal that the frequency of a word’s use in extralexical phonetic reducing environments and lexical stress patterns significantly predict the modern distribution of f‑ ([f]) and h‑ (Ø) in the Spanish lexicon of FV‑ words. Quantification of extralexical phonetic context of use has not previously been incorporated in studies of diachronic phonology. We find no effect of word frequency, lexical phonology, word class, or word transmission history. The results suggest that rather than frequency of use, it is more specifically a word’s likelihood of use in contexts favoring reduction that promotes phonological change. The failure to find a significant effect of transmission history highlights the relative importance of language internal sources of change. Results are consistent with usage-based approaches; contextual variation creates differential articulatory pressures among words, yielding variable pronunciations that, when registered in memory, promote diachronic change.

This paper isolates four parameters that guide the historical change of word classes: the quantificational parameter, the directional parameter, the preservative parameter and the temporal parameter. These parameters are involved in the organization of seven case studies in East Asian languages. Based on these case studies I define four diachronic tendencies that apply to East Asian languages and perhaps beyond: (1) the greater the size of the target word class, the lower the number of new acquired meanings; (2) if a word class engages on a path of change, then the greater its size, the more likely it is that the process of change in which it engages will be lexicalization; (3) in a typical process of grammaticalization relatively more meanings are generated than in a typical process of lexicalization; (4) processes of grammaticalization represent temporally short processes more often than processes of lexicalization.

Comparative data from several language families show that nasality can be transferred between a syllable-initial consonant cluster and the following vowel. The cases reported to date are summarized, and a new analysis is proposed for a set of Sino-Tibetan data. The evolution appears to go in both directions: from the consonantal onset to the following vowel in Tai-Kadai, Austroasiatic, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo (Kwa) and Indo-European (Celtic), and from the vowel to the preceding consonant in Siouan. However, an examination of the conditions on these changes brings out an asymmetry. In most cases, transfers of nasality take place from a consonantal onset to a following vowel; the instances we found of a regular change in the opposite direction all come from languages where there is one of the following restrictions on nasal sounds: (i) nasal consonants are nonphonemic (contextually predictable), or (ii) the opposition between nasal and oral vowels is neutralized after nasal consonants (in favor of nasal vowels).

This paper relies on the idea that syntactic change stems from linguistic factors that are different in nature and, consequently, trigger different results. Specifically, I distinguish the causes, processes and results related to two different kinds of syntactic change, a ‘formal’ type of change vs. a ‘functional’ one. The hypotheses pursued here are the following: (i) Mismatches between the formal features a learner has acquired and certain data she receives during the language acquisition period lead to a syntactic change type, which restructures completely the syntactic derivation involved; (ii) The advantage of parsing one variant over parsing another triggers a different kind of change, namely one that affects specific instances or uses / registers of the crucial syntactic structure. To illustrate this, I analyze the role of functional advantage and formal changes in the historical development of the case system of Russian non-verbal predication.