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22. Phonetics and Historical Phonology : The Handbook of Historical Linguistics : Blackwell Reference Online

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22. Phonetics and Historical Phonology

JOHN J. OHALA

Subject

Linguistics » Historical Linguistics

Key-Topics

phonetics

DOI:

10.1111/b.9781405127479.2004.00024.x

Two of the most successful enterprises in linguistics over the past couple of centuries have been (i) in

historical linguistics, reconstruction of the prehistory of languages via the comparative method, and (ii) in

phonetics, the development of methods and theories for understanding the workings of speech, that is, how

it is produced, its acoustic structure, and how it is perceived. My purpose in this chapter is to demonstrate

that the comparative method can be refined and elaborated still more if it is integrated with modern

scientific phonetics. By incorporating phonetics it is possible to implement a research program that

genuinely constitutes “experimental historical phonology” (Ohala 1974).

1 Background

1.1 Taxonomic versus scientific phonetics

In speaking of the integration of phonetics into historical phonology it must be understood that “phonetics”

refers to what I call “scientific phonetics,” 1 not “taxonomic phonetics.” The latter is the traditional, almost

exclusively articulatory phonetics which provides linguistics with the terminology and conceptual framework

for describing speech sounds and their natural classes. This descriptive system reached a high level of

refinement in the late nineteenth century through the efforts of phoneticians such as Alexander Melville Bell,

Otto Jespersen, Paul Passy, Henry Sweet, and Wilhelm Viëtor, and its basic structure has not changed very

much since. Scientific phonetics, on the other hand, has a very long tradition, dating at least from the time

of Galen, the second-century ad anatomist, with important contributions to the present time from other

anatomists, as well as physiologists, physicists, voice teachers, engineers, linguists, and others. It constantly

accumulates new data, methods, and theories on how speech works. Moreover, it tests these theories and

continually refines the evidence adduced in support of them. When the evidence fails to support proposed

theories, it abandons them, as is true of any mature discipline. It is scientific phonetics, not taxonomic

phonetics, that needs to be better joined with historical phonology.

There have, in fact, been many prior attempts to bring about this union. Prior to instrumental studies of

speech there were some conceptions of the workings of speech which were based on impressionistic

auditory or kinesthetic sensations and on direct visual inspection. Even at this stage of development in the

nineteenth century there were some applications of phonetics to historical phonology (Bindseil 1838; Rapp

1836; von Raumer 1863; Weymouth 1856). Some of the early attempts to synthesize speech (von Kempelen

1791; Willis 1830) inspired a few works attempting to explain sound change by reference to physical

properties of speech sounds, as they were understood at the time (Jacobi 1843; Key 1855).

Instrumental study of speech on live, intact, speakers blossomed in the 1860s and 1870s. 2 It is noteworthy

that one of the motivations for such research was at its onset the attempt to understand the mechanisms of

sound change. In 1876 Rosapelly declared optimistically (I translate) that:

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From the point of view of linguists, these (physiological) studies seem to be of great

importance, since their science, whose precision grows from day to day, tends to take

experimental study as its point of departure. The comparative study of different languages and

the study of the successive transformations undergone by each of them in the course of its

development have, in fact, permitted the secure formulation of certain laws that one can call

physiological and which have presided over the evolution of language.

Within a couple of decades this program produced, among other works, Rousselot's 1891 dissertation, which

was an attempt to present the physiological basis of some of the sound changes that transformed late Latin

into the regional dialect spoken in his home town.

There is still much of value to be gleaned from such early instrumental phonetic studies. One example is E.

A. Meyer's (1896–7) early discovery of the perturbations of F0 on vowels following voiced and voiceless

consonants -one of the topics that still preoccupies phoneticians both for its value to an understanding of

speech production (Löfqvist et al. 1989) and for its relevance to the phonological development of distinctive

tone from the influence of consonants (Hombert et al. 1979).

In instrumental phonetics, the discovery of the magnitude and range of lawful variation in speech must rank

as one of the major findings of linguistic science, although its full significance for an understanding of

sound change seems not yet to be fully appreciated. Having said this, it must be admitted that much of this

early work in laboratory phonetics had obvious limitations: due to technological constraints it focused almost

exclusively on the articulatory aspect of speech and neglected the acoustic and perceptual aspects. As many

modern studies have shown and as will be emphasized in this chapter, a proper understanding of sound

change requires reference to these other domains. Perhaps the one aspect of early phonetically informed

studies of sound change from which we may still draw inspiration is the expressed belief that sound change

and phonological universals may profitably be studied in the laboratory.

1.2 Constraints of the discussion

The following discussion of the mechanisms of sound change will be constrained in two ways. First, I will for

the most part be concerned only with those sound changes that are independently manifested in similar

form in different languages. The practical effect of this is to filter out changes due to language-specific or

culture-specific factors, for example, the influence of writing, regularization of morphological paradigms,

borrowing, etc. What remains is the vast majority of sound changes that have occupied phonologists’

attention over the past two centuries and which one can assume are caused by the only factors that are

common to all languages at all periods of time: the physical phonetic properties of the speech production

and perception systems. Second, I will focus primarily on the initiation of sound change, that is, the factors

that lead to variant pronunciation norms in the first place, not the subsequent spread or transmission of a

novel norm through the speech community or through the lexicon. The factors influencing the spread of a

sound change are social and psychological and may very well involve language and culture-specific factors.

(However, see Ohala 1995c for speculations on phonetic factors influencing some aspects of the spread of a

sound change.)

2 The Phonetic Basis of Sound Change

2.1 Sound change and synchronic phonetic variation

Detailed phonetic studies present us with two fundamental facts that force us to try to understand sound

change by looking carefully at the phonetics of speech production and speech perception. The first of these

is that there is a huge amount of variation in the way the “same” phonological unit is pronounced, whether

this unit is the phone, syllable, or word. The relatively short list of allophones given in conventional

phonemic descriptions of languages is just the “tip of the iceberg.” 3 Fine-grained instrumental analyses of

speech, especially recent acoustic studies, reveal that the variation is essentially infinite, though generally

showing lawful dependency with respect to the phonetic environment, speech-style, or characteristics of the

individual speaker (Lindblom 1963; Moon and Lindblom 1994; Sproat and Fujimura 1993; Sussman et al.

1991). Most of this variation is difficult to notice perceptually except through the use of controlled listening

tests (e.g., Ohala and Feder 1994). Even after a great deal of ingenious quantitative analysis (Bladon et al.

1984; Miller 1989; Peterson 1951; Syrdal and Gopal 1986) there does not yet exist a universally applicable

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1984; Miller 1989; Peterson 1951; Syrdal and Gopal 1986) there does not yet exist a universally applicable

way to normalize this variation in vowels, that is, to extract the linguistically relevant “sames” posited for the

speech signal. Until such normalizations are understood, the validity of most posited phonological units

remains in doubt. It is this situation that I was referring to when I stated above that the wealth of phonetic

variation discovered by instrumental phonetics confronts linguistics with a problem that it has yet to deal

with.

The second fundamental fact that motivates us to look at phonetics for an understanding of sound change is

that a great deal of phonetic variation parallels sound change, that is, synchronic variation, including that

which we find in present-day speech, resembles diachronic variation. The synchronic variation can be found

both in speech production and in speech perception.

2.2 Variation in speech production

For example, the fundamental frequency of vowels is perturbed by the voicing of preceding consonants:

higher initial F0 being found after voiceless consonants and lower initial F0 after voiced ones (Meyer 1896–

7). This parallels the conditioning of new tones in a number of languages (Edkins 1864; Maspero 1912;

Hombert et al. 1979). Svantesson (1983) provides examples of this from two related dialects of Kammu, one

of which has preserved the voicing of initial stops and the other of which has lost the voicing but has

acquired a tonal distinction; see (1):

(1)

Southern Kammu Northern Kammu Translation

klaaŋ

kláaŋ

‘eagle’

glaaŋ

klàaŋ

'stone’

A second example is the fact that the intensity and the duration of the noise element in the release burst of

[t] is greater preceding the high close vowel [i] or the glide [j] than it is before other vowels (Olive et al.

1993: 286; Ohala 1989). This finds a parallel in the phonological histories of numerous languages, for

example, Tai (Li 1977) and Bantu (Guthrie 1967–71) as well as English, where stops develop affricated

releases before high, close vowels, as exemplified in (2):

(2)

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Table 22.1 Data from Ikalanga showing that distinctive aspiration has developed on stops that

appeared before the Proto-Bantu super-close vowels but not before the next lower vowels

A third example is the finding that voice onset following a voiceless stop release is longer before high, close

vowels than before low, open vowels (Halle and Smith 1952; Klatt 1975; Ohala 1981b). A diachronic parallel

to this is the development of distinctive aspiration on voiceless stops in Ikalanga (Mathangwane 1996). In

Ikalanga (and many other Bantu languages) distinctive aspiration on certain stops arose out of the height

neutralization of the quality of the two highest front and back vowels, as shown in table 22.1 .

2.3 Variation in speech perception

Listeners occasionally make errors in perceiving speech. This is especially true when there is minimal higher-

level redundancy from pragmatics, semantics, syntax, and the lexicon. Such a situation is easily duplicated in

laboratory-based confusion studies where isolated nonsense syllables are presented to listeners for

identification. The results from one condition of one published study by Winitz et al. (1972) is given in table

22.2 .

The confusions shown in table 22.2 parallel some common, well-documented sound changes, as given in

table 22.3 . The parallels include the pairs of sounds involved, the phonetic environment (especially, whether

the stops are found in palatal or labial environments - where the palatalization or labialization is provided by

secondary articulations or by adjacent vowels or glides), and, in some cases, even the asymmetry in the

direction of the change (/p j / > /t/ is attested but not */t/ > /p j /). 4 Many other examples could be given

(see Ohala 1981a, 1993a, 1995b).

To recapitulate:

i much variation can be found in speech production and speech perception;

ii much of this variation parallels sound change.

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Table 22.2 Probabilities of identification of initial consonants as /p/, /t/, /k/ in the columns of

the stimuli in the rows

Table 22.3 Examples of sound changes involving large changes in place of articulation

But these two facts immediately raise the question: could this synchronic variation actually be sound change

observed “on the hoof”? Logically this would be difficult to accept, because if this were the case then we

would find sound change progressing at a rate very much faster than we do - in fact, several orders of

magnitude faster than present evidence suggests. All of the sound changes that transformed Proto-Indo-

European over five or six millennia into the present-day Indo-European languages would be accomplished in

a day or less. Somehow pronunciation remains relatively stable over time in spite of the great variation seen

in everyday speech. But if present-day variation is not sound change, then how do we account for the

uncanny similarities between them?

2.4 Variation in speech production = sound change?

The beginnings of a resolution of this paradox comes from experimental phonetics, specifically from studies

of speech perception. Several studies have shown that listeners’ judgments about what it is that they hear in

the speech signal are influenced by the context in which the sounds occur. Pickett and Decker (1960)

showed that listeners’ differentiation between topic and top pick is influenced by the rate at which the

sentence containing these utterances is spoken. Ladefoged and Broadbent (1957) showed that listeners

would identify the same vowel stimulus as /I/ or /ε/ depending on the F1 values of vowels in a precursor

sentence.

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