scholarly journals Diachronic Study of Phonological Changes in Tiv Language

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Terfa Aor ◽  
Torkuma Tyonande Damkor
Keyword(s):  
Research Design ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Sound Change ◽  
Language Analysis ◽  
Sound Changes ◽  
Diachronic Study ◽  
Language Growth ◽  
Observation Method ◽  
Phonological Change

All levels of language analysis are prone to changes in their phonology, morphology, graphology, lexis, semantics and syntax over the years. Tiv language is not an exception to this claim. This study investigates various aspects of phonological or sound changes in Tiv language. This paper therefore classifies sound changes in Tiv; states causes of sound changes in Tiv and explores implications of sound changes. The research design used in this paper is purposive sampling of relevant data. The instrument used in this paper is the observation method in which the author selected words that showed epenthesis, deletion and substitution. It has been noted that the use of archaic spellings in the Modern Tiv literatures shows their ancientness. Phonological change is not a deviation but a sign of language growth and changes in spellings result in changes in sounds. The author recommends that scholars should write papers or critical works on lexical/morphological, syntactic, semantic, graphological changes in Tiv language. Students should write projects, dissertations and theses on language change and diachronic linguistics. This study introduces Tiv historical linguistics and diachronic phonology which serve as catalysts for the study of Tiv language. The understanding of Tiv sound change provides students with a much better understanding of Tiv phonological system in general, of how Tiv phonology works and how the phonemes fit together

Ordering paradoxes in phonology

1971 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. E. Newton
Keyword(s):  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Sound Change ◽  
Abstract Objects ◽  
Traditional Attitude ◽  
Long Period ◽  
Sound Changes ◽  
Phonological Rules

1. It may be claimed that current views regarding the nature of sound change fall into two broad categories: the more traditional attitude would treat an individual sound change as a complex trend or process taking perhaps several generations to establish itself, and then retaining its activity over a long period of time; whence the characteristic concern of classical historical linguistics with the establishment of absolute and relative termini post and ante quern, i More recently adherents of the generative–transformational school have interpreted sound changes as readjustments in the system of phonological rules; thus Postal (1968: 270) claims:‘What really changes is not sounds but grammars. And grammars are abstract objects – sets of rules represented in human organisms.’

On the hierarchy of naturalness principles in inflectional morphology

1993 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max W. Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
Language Change ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Sound Change ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Human Psychology ◽  
Prague School

1. This article proposes a criticism and elaboration of the theory of Natural Morphology as it relates to inflection and to inflectional change. The theoretical framework I start from is that set out at length in Mayerthaler (1981/1988), Wurzel (1984/1989), Dressler (1987) and Kilani-Schoch (1988). The concept of naturalness involved here combines Prague School notions of markedness (see Andersen, 1989) with more recent typological approaches and a semiotic framework which derives from the work of C. S. Peirce. The goal of naturalness theories in historical linguistics is to identify some constraints on language change (for example, on sound change, analogy and grammaticalization) which are, broadly speaking, functionally motivated, that is, motivated by the nature of human psychology or of human communication. Naturalness theories offer an approach to explanation of Weinreich, Labov & Herzog's (1968; 102, 186) actuation problem. Among other things, Natural Morphology proposes explanatory principles and constraints for analogy.

scholarly journals Mergers in Bardi: contextual probability and predictors of sound change

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (s2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Babinski ◽  
Claire Bowern
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Sound Change ◽  
Minimal Pair ◽  
Functional Load ◽  
Crucial Question ◽  
Minimal Pairs ◽  
Pair Density ◽  
Sound Changes ◽  
Australian Languages

AbstractA crucial question for historical linguistics has been why some sound changes happen but not others. Recent work on the foundations of sound change has argued that subtle distributional facts about segments in a language, such as functional load, play a role in facilitating or impeding change. Thus not only are sound changes not all equally plausible, but their likelihood depends in part on phonotactics and aspects of functional load, such as the density of minimal pairs. Tests of predictability on the chance of phoneme merger suggest that phonemes with low functional load (as defined by minimal pair density) are more likely to merge, but this has been investigated only for a small number of languages with very large corpora and well attested mergers. Here we present work suggesting that the same methods can be applied to much smaller corpora, by presenting the results of a preliminary exploration of nine Australian languages, with a particular focus on Bardi, a Nyulnyulan language from Australia’s northwest. Our results support the hypothesis that the probability of merger is higher when phonemes distinguish few minimal pairs.

The time variable in phonological change

1971 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Chen ◽  
Hsin-I Hsieh
Keyword(s):  
Sound Change ◽  
Time Variable ◽  
The Other ◽  
Time Dimension ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Obvious Reason ◽  
Sound Changes ◽  
The One ◽  
Phonological Change

One of the perennial problems in diachronic linguistics is how to reconcile, on the one hand, the Neogrammarian postulate of sound laws operating without exception, and, on the other hand, the embarrassingly numerous irregularities we observe in many languages. On most occasions linguists have attempted to solve the problem by positing interdialectal borrowing or analogical levelling and have largely overlooked the possibility of the gradual diffusion of phonological changes across the lexicon. As a result of the lexical gradualness of sound changes, exceptions may be created either through the incompletion of a sound change, or owing to the conflict of two sound changes overlapping along the time dimension. It is the latter concept that we will attempt to elaborate and illustrate with two sets of data, both from Peking dialect. We have chosen Chinese as a case study for an obvious reason: it is possible in the case of Chinese, like few other cases, to follow sound changes step by step through the phonological dictionaries, rhyme charts and other records compiled at various stages of history. The columns on Tables 1 and 2 contain information taken from the various datable phonological dictionaries.

Old French declension

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alain Kihm
Keyword(s):  
Language Change ◽  
Old French ◽  
Sound Change ◽  
French Language ◽  
Word Form ◽  
Plural Form ◽  
Sound Changes ◽  
History Of

Old French noun inflection emerged and disappeared early in the history of the French language. A number or reasons are examined including the nature of sound changes occurring between Late Latin and Old French. Paradigm structure is another reason. The declensional paradigms of masculine nouns produced a mismatch between morphological and semantic defaults for the number and case features. This was because the non-default values of these features came to be expressed by a morphologically default, uninflected word-form, thus resulting in a system that was both weird in terms of the morphology-semantics interface and probably hard to acquire and to process. Repairing the mismatch entailed giving up declension in favour of a simple number contrast where the semantic non-defaultness of plurality matches the inflectedness of the plural form. Default considerations thus played the role of analogy in the Neogrammarian scenario of language change, restoring order where sound change had created chaos.

scholarly journals Exaptation and phonological change

2015 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kamil Kaźmierski
Keyword(s):  
Language Change ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Darwinian Evolution ◽  
Explicit Recognition ◽  
Phonological Change

AbstractLooking at the fate of the concept of exaptation in historical linguistics, this article attempts an extension of exaptation from morphosyntactic change to phonological change. It argues that explicit recognition of the links between language change and other manifestations of Darwinian evolution can provide a context in which the use of this concept might be justified. First, an overview of the applications of exaptation in linguistics is provided (

Diachrony

2015 ◽  
pp. 232-250
Author(s):  
Claire Bowern
Keyword(s):  
Morphological Change ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Genetic Relationships ◽  
Sound Change ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Valuable Source ◽  
Morphology Change ◽  
Recent Advances ◽  
History Of

I survey the history of work in historical morphology and recent advances in the study of morphological change. Morphology has played an important role in historical linguistics, from arguments concerning constraints on the regularity of sound change, to language classification. I describe how inflectional morphology interacts with other linguistic systems in language change (particularly phonology and syntax), and discuss arguments regard the autonomy of morphology change. Morphology has been considered quite stable in language, which would appear to make it a valuable source of evidence for the reconstruction of remote genetic relationships; however, while several families have been proposed where the argument relies on morphological categories alone, such evidence does not constitute a reliable argument for relationship in the absence of cognate material.

scholarly journals Connecting Structure and Variation in Sound Change

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 01-20
Author(s):  
David Natvig ◽  
Joseph Salmons
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Sound Change ◽  
Phonological Representation ◽  
Social Differentiation ◽  
Phonological Structure ◽  
Abstract Representations ◽  
Variationist Sociolinguistics ◽  
Sound Changes ◽  
Phonological Change

“Structured heterogeneity”, a founding concept of variationist sociolinguistics, puts focus on the ordered social differentiation in language. We extend the notion of structured heterogeneity to formal phonological structure, i.e., representations based on contrasts, with implications for phonetic implementation. Phonology establishes parameters for what varies and how. Patterns of stability and variability with respect to a given feature’s relationship to representations allow us to ground variationist analysis in a framework that makes predictions about potential sound changes: more structure correlates to more stability; less structure corresponds to more variability. However, even though all change requires variability, not all variability leads to change. Two case studies illustrate this asymmetry, keeping a focus on phonetic change with phonological stability. First, Germanic rhotics (r-sounds) from prehistory to the present day are minimally specified. They show tremendous phonetic variability and change but phonological stability. Second, laryngeal contrasts (voicing or aspiration) vary and change in language contact. We track the accumulation of phonetic change in unspecified members of pairs of the type spelled <s> ≠ <z>, etc. This analysis makes predictions about the regularity of sound change, situating regularity in phonology and irregularity in phonetics and the lexicon. Structured heterogeneity involves the variation inherent within the system for various levels of phonetic and phonological representation. Phonological change, then, is about acquiring or learning different abstract representations based on heterogeneous and variable input.

scholarly journals An Inventory of Tibetan Sound Laws

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 441-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
NATHAN W. HILL
Keyword(s):  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Sound Change ◽  
Sound Changes

Scholars of Indo-European historical linguistics have long found it convenient to refer to well known sound changes by the name of the researcher who first noticed the correspondences the sound change accounts for. Because of the proven utility of such named sound laws in Indo-European linguistics, the explicit listing and naming of sound laws in the Tibeto-Burman family could be expected to bring similar benefits.

HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS.Herbert Schendl. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xi + 130. $12.95 paper.

2003 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 589-589
Author(s):  
Michael C. Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
General Reader ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Linguistic History ◽  
Lexical Change ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Grammatical Change ◽  
Phonological Change

This brief volume is a contribution to the Oxford introductions to language study series, a set of nontechnical guides to various aspects of the study of language, intended for the general reader with no formal background in linguistics. This book, like the others in the series, is not intended to be a systematic introduction to its subject but rather is designed to give readers a general sense of historical linguistics and to steer them in the direction of further readings. The book is divided into four parts. The first and largest part comprises eight brief essays that treat: (a) the fact that languages evolve over time and attitudes toward them change, (b) data and evidence for reconstructing linguistic history, (c) lexical change, (d) grammatical change, (e) phonological change, (f) language contact, (g) explanations for language change, and (h) recent developments in historical linguistics. The remaining parts of the book contain brief excerpts from readings, further readings, bibliographic references, and a glossary.

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