Meeting Time: Monday - Thursday 1:320 - 3:15 pm
Location: Clare 111
Instructoror: John J. Ohala
email: ohala@berkeley.edu
homepage:http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/phonlab/users/ohala/index3.html
Office hours: 3:30-5:00; Location: IBS 1B41 ... or by appointment
Reading: Can be accessed and downloaded from the above homepage or links below::
Ohala, J. J. 1983. The origin of sound patterns in vocal tract constraints. In: P. F. MacNeilage (ed.), The production of speech. New York: Springer-Verlag. 189 - 216.
Ohala, J. J. 1981. The listener as a source of sound change. In: C. S. Masek, R. A. Hendrick, & M. F. Miller (eds.), Papers from the Parasession on Language and Behavior. Chicago: Chicago Ling. Soc. 178 - 203.
Ohala, J. J. & Riordan, C. J. 1979. Passive vocal tract enlargement during voiced stops. In: J. J. Wolf & D. H. Klatt (eds.), Speech communication papers. New York: Acoust. Soc. of Am. 89 - 92. [Abstract: J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 65.S23 (1978).]
Ohala, J. J. 1987. Experimental phonology. Proc. Ann. Meeting, Berkeley Ling. Soc. 13.207-222
Ohala, J. J. 1990. The phonetics and phonology of aspects of assimilation. [And: A response to Pierrehumbert's commentary] In J. Kingston & M. Beckman (eds.), Papers in Laboratory Phonology I: Between the grammar and the physics of speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 258-275; 280-282.
Ohala, J. J. 1995. A probable case of clicks influencing the sound patterns of some European languages. Phonetica 52.160-170.
You are, of course, free to read any of the other papers listed on my homepage and to comment on them, raise issues they provoke, etc. whether in email to me, in class discussion, or in office hours.
Assignments: There will be two: TBA
I thought I heard you say that sound change almost alway originates from the listeners' misperceptions. I'm wondering how this claim can be reconciled with various ongoing sound changes reported in the Sociolinguistics literature.
ReplyDeleteSo, for example, it is claimed that various dialects of North American English are undergoing very extensive changes in the realizations of various vowels e.g. a low front vowel being raised while a high front vowel is being lowered etc.
Within the variationist approach these changes are seen as driven by social factors: the changed forms are found more in more casual speech for all social classes & they are found more in the speech of interior social classes. It's very hard to see how such a pattern could be driven by listeners. Indeed the claim is made that each new age cohort will advance the change and that this trend can be maintained for a considerable length of time.
Now there is the issue of distinguishing the origination of a change from its spreading but here the claim is that the social significance of the ongoing change is acquired by each new generation and as a result they advance the change. So the formerly low vowel is now raised further by young speakers and a 17 year old will (it is claimed) have, say, a higher vowel than she had as a 12 year old.
In studies of listeners' perceptions of the most advanced tokens of certain changes it has been found that even speakers who use the advanced forms are liable to misunderstand them when they are played for them without any disambiguating contest.
So a speaker who pronounces the word "socks" as something like [sæks] will actually identify it as "sacks."
Is this all an illusion, and all these reported changes just some kind of code switching or something?
Are there at least two fundamentally different types of sound change?
Is there some way to bring these kinds of changes into the listener-driven fold?
I keep thinking that distinguishing origination from spread is very important but I can't see how that accounts for this data.
Jack Toner
I am a klutz when it comes to these blogs. I just posted a long response to your comment (very welcome, BTW) but while finding links to insert into it, what I had composed somehow disappeared into the ether.
ReplyDeleteMaking the point more briefly: low vowels are known to raise without leading to any other vowels shifting; high vowels are known to lower without any other vowels shifting as a consequence. Why think that in this case the two mechanisms are related?
In any case, I am not persuaded by arguments of the sort 'what else could it be?' Give me the evidence of a causal linkage.
I may be wrong in my skepticism but it should at least have the benefit of leading those of the opposing view to come up with the definitive empirical evidence. I have tried to come up with such empirical evidence myself and the results were negative:
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/phonlab/users/ohala/papers/clearspeech.pdf
Bad experiment or the right answer? That can be addressed by another better experiment. That is the way in science.
John Ohala