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Lexical diffusion is the hypothesis that a
sound change A sound change, in historical linguistics, is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic chang ...
is an abrupt change that spreads gradually across the words in a language to which it is applicable. It contrasts with the
Neogrammarian The Neogrammarians (German: ''Junggrammatiker'', 'young grammarians') were a German school of linguists, originally at the University of Leipzig, in the late 19th century who proposed the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change ...
view that a sound change results from phonetically-conditioned articulatory drift acting uniformly on all applicable words, which implies that sound changes are regular, with exceptions attributed to analogy and dialect borrowing. Similar views were expressed by Romance
dialectologist Dialectology (from Greek , ''dialektos'', "talk, dialect"; and , ''-logia'') is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their assoc ...
s in the late 19th century but were reformulated and renamed by William Wang and coworkers studying
varieties of Chinese Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast of main ...
in the 1960s and the 1970s.
William Labov William Labov ( ; born December 4, 1927) is an American linguist widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of ...
found evidence for both processes but argued that they operate at different levels.


Neogrammarians and dialectologists

A key assumption of
historical linguistics Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include: # to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages # ...
is that
sound change A sound change, in historical linguistics, is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic chang ...
is regular. The principle was summarized by the
Neogrammarian The Neogrammarians (German: ''Junggrammatiker'', 'young grammarians') were a German school of linguists, originally at the University of Leipzig, in the late 19th century who proposed the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change ...
s in the late 19th century in the slogan "sound laws suffer no exceptions" and forms the basis of the
comparative method In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards t ...
of reconstruction and the
tree model In historical linguistics, the tree model (also Stammbaum, genetic, or cladistic model) is a model of the evolution of languages analogous to the concept of a family tree, particularly a phylogenetic tree in the biological evolution of species. ...
of linguistic evolution. Inspired by the Uniformitarian Principle of geology, Neogrammarians such as
Hermann Paul Hermann Otto Theodor Paul (August 7, 1846, Salbke – December 29, 1921, Munich) was a German philologist, linguist and lexicographer. Biography He studied at Berlin and Leipzig, and in 1874 became professor of German language and literatu ...
described regularity as a consequence of the operation of sound change as an imperceptible articulatory drift conditioned by the phonetic environment.
Leonard Bloomfield Leonard Bloomfield (April 1, 1887 – April 18, 1949) was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. He is considered to be the father of American distributionalism ...
later summarized this view: He summarized the mechanism as "phonemes change". Despite the unequivocal form in which these slogans are often quoted, the Neogrammarians admitted two exceptions to regular sound change: analogy and dialect borrowing. Uniform sound change was first challenged by
Hugo Schuchardt Hugo Ernst Mario Schuchardt (4 February 1842, Gotha (Thuringia) – 21 April 1927, Graz ( Styria)) was an eminent German linguist, best known for his work in the Romance languages, the Basque language, and in mixed languages, including pidgins, ...
, a
dialectologist Dialectology (from Greek , ''dialektos'', "talk, dialect"; and , ''-logia'') is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their assoc ...
of
Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language fam ...
, who wrote in his criticism of the Neogrammarians: Dialectologists studying the Romance languages found many apparent exceptions to uniformity, as reflected in their slogan, ''chaque mot a son histoire'' ('every word has its own history'). This is commonly ascribed to
Jules Gilliéron Jules Gilliéron (21 December 1854 – 26 April 1926) was a Swiss-French linguist and dialectologist. From 1883 until his death, he taught dialectology at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris. In 1887, he co-founded the ''Revue des pato ...
but also originated with Schuchardt. An example is the shortening of English 'u' (the
foot-strut split Most dialects of modern English have two close back vowels: the near-close near-back rounded vowel found in words like ''foot'', and the close back rounded vowel (realized as central in many dialects) found in words like ''goose''. The vowel ...
), resulting in different vowels in the words ''cut'' and ''put''. When the
isogloss An isogloss, also called a heterogloss (see Etymology below), is the geographic boundary of a certain linguistic feature, such as the pronunciation of a vowel, the meaning of a word, or the use of some morphological or syntactic feature. Major d ...
defining this feature in England is examined closely, it emerges that individual words are moving from to over time, and individual speakers fluctuate in their pronunciation of the same words. Some sound changes, such as metathesis or
haplology Haplology (from Ancient Greek, Greek "simple" and , "speech") is, in spoken language, the elision (elimination or deletion) of an entire syllable through dissimilation (a differentiating shift that affects two neighboring similar sounds). The ...
, are inherently discontinuous and hence incompatible with gradual, imperceptible change.


Wang's reformulation

In 1962,
Peking University Peking University (PKU; ) is a public research university in Beijing, China. The university is funded by the Ministry of Education. Peking University was established as the Imperial University of Peking in 1898 when it received its royal charter ...
published the ''Hanyu Fangyin Zihui'', containing transcriptions of 2444 morphemes in 17 modern
varieties of Chinese Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast of main ...
. The DOC project at the
University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
, headed by William Wang, attempted to apply the
comparative method In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards t ...
to a computerized form of this data. However, the Chinese data revealed pervasive irregularities. For example,
Middle Chinese Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the '' Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The ...
words in the third tone class (the "departing" tone) with voiced initials have two reflexes in the modern
Teochew dialect Teochew or Chaozhou (, , , Teochew endonym: , Shantou dialect: ) is a dialect of Chaoshan Min, a Southern Min language, that is spoken by the Teochew people in the Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong and by their diaspora around the world. I ...
, but no phonetic factor has been found to condition the split. Cheng and Wang list 12 pairs of words that were homophonous in Middle Chinese but have different modern pronunciations. Similar examples were found on other Chinese varieties and other language families. Wang accounted for such irregularities by positing a form of lexical diffusion: In his view, a sound change would be regular if the change had completed its progress through the lexicon, but irregularity would be seen if the change were still incomplete or if it were interrupted by another change. Other linguists responded that the explanation of the irregularities should be sought in dialect mixture. Indeed, Wang and Lien discovered that the Teochew phenomenon was the result of borrowing from the local literary reading tradition. They present a revised model that distinguishes between the initial "actuation" of a sound change by language contact or internal factors, and its "implementation" by lexical diffusion.


Evaluation

Labov found evidence for both processes, but argued that they operate at different levels: * Regular sound change occurs when the phonetic realization of a phoneme varies gradually and continuously. The process affects all words containing the phoneme uniformly. Examples include
vowel shift A vowel shift is a systematic sound change in the pronunciation of the vowel sounds of a language. The best-known example in the English language is the Great Vowel Shift, which began in the 15th century. The Greek language also underwent a vowe ...
s and
diphthongization In historical linguistics, vowel breaking, vowel fracture, or diphthongization is the sound change of a monophthong into a diphthong or triphthong. Types Vowel breaking may be unconditioned or conditioned. It may be triggered by the presence of ...
, weakening of
glide Glide may refer to: * Gliding flight, to fly without thrust Computing *Glide API, a 3D graphics interface *Glide OS, a web desktop *Glide (software), an instant video messenger *Glide, a molecular docking software by Schrödinger (company), Schrà ...
s and unstressed vowels, vocalization of liquids, and changes in the
manner of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the manner of articulation is the configuration and interaction of the articulators (speech organs such as the tongue, lips, and palate) when making a speech sound. One parameter of manner is ''stricture,'' that is, h ...
of consonants. * Lexical diffusion represents a change in the phonemes in a word (substitution, metathesis,
elision In linguistics, an elision or deletion is the omission of one or more sounds (such as a vowel, a consonant, or a whole syllable) in a word or phrase. However, these terms are also used to refer more narrowly to cases where two words are run toget ...
,
epenthesis In phonology, epenthesis (; Greek ) means the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially in the beginning syllable ('' prothesis'') or in the ending syllable (''paragoge'') or in-between two syllabic sounds in a word. The word ''epenth ...
). It is abrupt and applies to words selected by lexical, grammatical or social criteria.
Paul Kiparsky René Paul Victor Kiparsky (born January 28, 1941) is a Finnish professor of linguistics at Stanford University. He is the son of the Russian-born linguist and Slavicist Valentin Kiparsky. Kiparsky is especially known for his contributions to ...
argues that under a proper definition of analogy as optimization, lexical diffusion is a non-proportional type of analogy similar to
leveling Levelling or leveling (American English; see spelling differences) is a branch of surveying, the object of which is to establish or verify or measure the height of specified points relative to a datum. It is widely used in geodesy and cartogra ...
, rather than a type of sound change.


References

Works cited * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


Further reading

* * * ** ** {{citation , title=The lexicon in phonological change: W.S.Y. Wang, Mouton, The Hague, 1977 Monographs on Linguistic Analysis 5. 278 pp. 112 DM , given=Douglas C. , surname=Walker , journal=Lingua , volume=49 , issue=4 , year=1979 , pages=361–363 , doi=10.1016/0024-3841(79)90050-0 , postscript = . , ref = none Historical linguistics Sociolinguistics Linguistic theories and hypotheses