Speaker vs Listener-based Sound Change

Speaker-caused vs. Listener-caused Sound Change

Camille X has presented me with some examples of sound change which require a more careful ‘parsing’ of the word ‘cause’.  (Apparently we have stumbled into a domain with deep philosophical and metaphysical implications:  http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-metaphysics/  ).  But let me try to simplify this by invoking the legal concepts of ‘murder’ as opposed ‘(involuntary) manslaughter’.  In both cases the result is a dead person and the one who *caused* that person to be dead.  A person is guilty of murder if they intentionally caused the death; the charge of involuntary manslaughter applies if that person caused the death but without intention (e.g., through negligence).  The legal consequences, of course, are very different.   A similar distinction applies when talking about sound change (though, thankfully, there are no legal consequences).

Even though there are sound changes such as stop emergence (e.g., Thompson from Thom + son)  that are ‘caused’ by speakers (due to premature velic closure  and glottal abduction) during the latter portion of the nasal  they are responsible only of ‘involuntarily’ creating conditions which might lead to sound change.  But in our domain (as opposed to the legal domain), the listener also can be said to have ‘caused’ the sound change because she failed to engage the usual ‘normaliazation’ or ‘correction’ processes which allow for the discounting of the emergent stop in the stated environment.  So who is to blame?  In my view, neither party is to blame.  This is why I have referred to such sound changes as due to ‘innocent misapprehensions’.   Neither the speaker nor the listener intended for a new pronunciation norm to be created; it emerged from explicable and blameless actions of both.

As in homicide cases, this example can be parsed in more detail.  If we are partitioning ‘cause’ between the speaker and listener we might also assign less of the ‘total cause’ to the speaker because she might plead that she was counting on the listener to be able to use the expected normalization or corrective measures to recover her (the speaker’s) intended pronunciation.  And ultimately in this case where one might have a chain of causal events, the listener was the last possible ‘filter’ that could have prevented the sound change.  This is why I have labeled such sound changes as ‘listener based’.

In the same class would be cases of stop affrication before high, close, vowels, as well as cases where the speaker tries to overecome  the Aerodynamic Voicing Constraint by implementing implosion, retroflexion of apicals, pre-nasalization, or ATR (Advanced Tongue Root).   

In a different class would be sound changes where the speaker can be considered to have made her articulations in a way that adhered to the canonical pronunciation but, due to physical physiological, or acoustic constraints, the output signal was ambiguous.  This happens in some cases of sound change involving labial-velar (doubly articulated consonants like /w, kp, gb, ŋm/ and to some cases of palatalized or labialized consonants [to be treated in later lectures]

In all these cases, though, it is the listener’s blameless error that introduces a new pronunciation norm, i.e., what I have referred to as a ‘mini-sound change’.  Why is this important?  Two reasons:

1)        It undermines claims that speakers introduce a new pronunciation error due to either laziness (ease of articulation, also termed ‘lenition’) or hyperarticulation (to make things clearer for the listener, also termed ‘fortition’).  These are teleological explanations, i.e., they attribute to the speaker some goal, some purpose.  If speakers had such freedom to change pronunciation norms then sound change would occur more rapidly and more often than is the case, and would suggest that they have no compelling interest in communicating with others in their speech community.

2)      Attributing sound change to lenition or fortition is done without much (any?) empirical evidence.  They are like game pieces, played at will. 

Why am I pushing the idea of listener-based sound change?    

1)       A wider range of sound changes may be explained by this theory and furthermore, empirical evidence for this account may be (and has been) obtained through controlled experimental work.

2)      It characterizes sound change as non-teleological and thus re-affirms the fundamental principle that we speak in order to communicate (and this requires adhering to the pronunciation norms of the speech community).  Sound change, therefore, is rare.