Sound Change

2. Explain the difference between the following sound changes:

Sporandic / Regular

Sporandic = affects only a few words, not the entire language; the change is unpredictable.

Ex. OE spræc => PDE speech. Loss of r is not general – spring, spree etc. retain it

Regular = apply throughout language; are predictable

Ex. In Spanish, p changes into b when intervocalic

Conditioned/Unconditioned

Conditioned sound change = dependent on certain contexts and affects only some of the sound’s occurrences.

Ex. In Spanish, p changes into b when intervocalic

Unconditioned sound change = occurs generally and is not dependent on the phonetic context or restricted by neighbouring sounds

Ex. P at the beginning of words = p.

Phonemic/phonological and Non‐phonemic/phonetic

Non-phonemic (allophonic change) do not alter the total number of phonemes in the language => non-phonemic shift = change in pronunciation (phonetic level), but no changes in phonemic level.

Phonemic = change the structural organization of the inventory of sounds – adds/deletes phonemes/basic sounds in the langauge

4. Explain the following concepts:

Assimilation

Chain shift

- interconnected changes with far-reaching impact on the overall phonological system of the language

- often atrributed to notions such as "symmetry in phonemic inventories", "naturalness", "markedness", "maximum differentiation", "a tendency for holes in phonological patterns to be filled"

the general idea: sound systems tend to be symmetrical or natural, and those that are not (with gaps in the inventory(, tend to change to make them symmetrical or natural (to fill the gap) --> a change which fills one gap may create other gaps elsewhere in the system -> other changes towards symmetry

- 2 types: pull chains x push chains

- a pull chain: one change may create a hole in the phonemic pattern which is followed by another change which wfills the hole by "pulling" some sounds from somewhere else in the system and changing that sound to fit the nedds of symmetry --> the sound shich shiftedto fill the original hole in the patterns leaves a new hole elsewhere in the pattern --> some other change may "pull" some other sounds to fill that gap

- a push chain: notion that languages (or thier speakers) want to maintain difference between sounds in the system in order to facilitate understanding, the processing of what is heard. A sound starts changing by moving into the articulatory space of another sounds --> change where the sound moves away from the encroaching one in order to maintain distinctions important to meaning --> if the sound is pushed towars articulatory space of some other sound, then it may shift to avoid the encroachment

Apocope (tata > tat)

- loss of a sound, usually a vowel, at the end of a word

- OE vs PDE nouns sticca> stick, sunu > son, mona > moon

Syncope (atata > atta)

- the loss of a vowel from interior of a word

- in many varieties of English = fam(i)ly, mem(o)ry

- Vulgar Latin > Western Romance languages = the unstressed vowels other than a lost in the interior of words three syllables long or longer (pópulu > poplV-, French peuple, English people)