This article revisits, extends and interrogates the position advocated in Honeybone (2019) — that phonotactic constraints are psychologically real phonological entities (namely: constraints on ...output-like forms), which have a diachrony of their own, and which can also interfere with diachronic segmental change by inhibiting otherwise regular innovations. I focus in the latter part of the article on the role of one phonotactic constraint in the history of English: *Rime-xxŋ. I argue that we need to investigate the emergence of such constraints in the history of languages and I show how this particular constraint, once innovated (which occurs through constraint scattering), can be understood to have inhibited the patterning of ash-tensing in certain varieties of American English (and also that it may now have been lost in some varieties). To do this, I adopt a phonological model which combines aspects of Rule-Based Phonology and aspects of Constraint-Based Phonology, and which is firmly rooted in the variation that exists when changes are innovated. Finally, I evaluate the extent to which the type of phonotactically-driven process-inhibition that I propose here involves prophylaxis in phonological change (I show that it doesn't), and I consider the interaction of these ideas with the proposal that all change occurs in language acquisition (‘acquisitionism’).
One question that historical phonology should reasonably seek to answer is: are there impossible changes? That is: are there plausible changes that we could reasonably expect to occur in the ...diachrony of languages’ phonologies, but which nonetheless do not ever occur? In this paper I seek to spell out what it really means to consider this question and what we need to do in order to answer it for any specific case. This will require a consideration of some fundamental issues in historical phonology, including the distinction between exceptionless and lexically-specific/sporadic changes (which I call ‘N-changes’ and ‘A-changes’), and the connection between that distinction and the ‘misperception’ model of phonological change. It will involve an analysis of aspects of the phonological history of Pulo Annian, Arabic, Italic, Spanish and several varieties of English. I argue that the current state of evidence indicates that there are indeed impossible changes (which I symbolise using ‘x ≯ y’ to represent that ‘x cannot change into y’) in a very specific but phonologically real way, and that f ≯ θ is one.
Do individual differences affect sound change? Traditional approaches to phonetic and phonological change typically downplay differences between the individuals who make up a speech community that is ...undergoing change, but this has been questioned in recent years in a number of ways from within several distinct traditions of research. The articles in the Glossa Special Collection to which this article is an introduction consider the extent to which individual differences (at a psychological, sociological, physiological, genetic and/or behavioral level) between the members of a speech community might or might not be important in explaining the general properties of sound change. This introduction places these articles in context, considers what we might mean by ‘sound change’ and ‘individual differences’, and aims to build a synthesis of the current research landscape in the area.
This paper shows that the Liverpool English dorsal fricative, derived through the lenition of /k/, is subject to place of articulation assimilation, driven by the preceding vowel. This is similar to ...the vowel-driven aspects of typical perseverative Dorsal Fricative Assimilation (a type of palatalisation), as found, for example, in the German ich-Laut~ach-Laut alternation, where (among other things) a preceding front high or mid vowel is followed by the front dorsal ç, and other vowels are followed by a back dorsal. However, the majority Liverpool English pattern differs from previously described cases of Dorsal Fricative Assimilation in that ç only occurs following long front high vowels, while a back dorsal remains after their short congeners. This type of quantity-sensitive pattern in assimilation has not been reported before. We use Centre of Gravity measurements to investigate this pattern of place assimilation, and argue for the use of an innovative normalisation technique for consonant measurements, based on measurements of /k/ aspiration in a linear regression model. We thus both expand the taxonomy of what is known to be possible in phonology and also provide new detail in the description of Liverpool English (including a proposal for the featural analysis of its vowel system).
This article considers the interaction of phonotactics and diachrony. I argue two things: (i) language-specific phonotactic constraints on phonological forms can inhibit otherwise regular ...innovations, and (ii) the fact that such phonotactically-motivated process inhibition occurs in historical phonology is itself evidence for the reality of phonotactic constraints. I assume that there is a difference between those gaps in a language’s lexicon which are due to chance (‘A-gaps’) and those which are ruled out by the grammar (‘S-gaps’) and I consider some evidence in favour of this view. I consider two case studies where an understanding of phonotactics is necessary to analyse the patterning of change: Mid-Scots θ-debuccalisation and a late Middle English syncope. I ground the discussion in arguments about what phonotactic constraints are, and how they can be involved in diachrony. This involves a consideration of a number of examples from English, including onset-OCP-related constraints, the OCP (sibilance) constraint, and the constraint which imposes the defective distribution of h.
In this article we investigate a phenomenon in which non-standard spelling is normal in professionally produced, published English. Specifically, we discuss the literary genre of
Contemporary ...Humorous Localised Dialect Literature
(CHLDL), in which semi-phonological spellings are used to represent aspects of non-standard varieties. Our aims are twofold: 1) we provide, by example, a framework for the quantitative analysis of such types of dialect orthography, which treats respellings as linguistic variables, and 2) we argue that this type of quantitative analysis of CHLDL can shed light on which phonological features are sociolinguistically salient in a given variety, as long as we bear in mind both what is possible orthographically and the phonological status of the dialect features involved. We explore these issues by investigating a corpus of ‘folk phrasebooks’ which represent the variety of English spoken in Liverpool (Scouse), in the north-west of England.
English Language and Linguistics has reached volume 25. This kind of jubilee prompts reflection and we four current editors of the journal would like to take this opportunity to look back over its ...history a little, to consider how it has developed during its first quarter-century.
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