The study of sound change in progress in Philadelphia has been facilitated by the application of forced alignment and automatic vowel measurement to a large corpus of neighborhood studies, including 379 speakers with dates of birth from 1888 to 1991. Two of the sound changes active in the 1970s show a linear pattern of incrementation in succeeding decades. The fronting of back upgliding vowels /aw/ and /ow/ shows a reversal in the direction of change, beginning with those born after 1940. The study also finds a general withdrawal from two salient features of local phonology, tense /æh/ and /oh/, led by those with higher education. Younger speakers with higher education have also reorganized the traditional Philadelphia tense/lax split of short- a to form a nasal system with tensing before all and only nasal consonants. The development of the Philadelphia vowel system can be understood in the geographic context of neighboring dialects. Features in common with North and North Midland dialects have accelerated in use while features in common with South Midland and Southern dialects have been reversed in favor of Northern patterns. The microevolution of a linguistic system can be seen here as subject to phonological generalizations but driven by social evaluation as features rise in level of salience for members of the speech community.
In this study, we investigate cross-linguistic patterns in the alternation between UM, a hesitation marker consisting of a neutral vowel followed by a final labial nasal, and UH, a hesitation marker consisting of a neutral vowel in an open syllable. Based on a quantitative analysis of a range of spoken and written corpora, we identify clear and consistent patterns of change in the use of these forms in various Germanic languages (English, Dutch, German, Norwegian, Danish, Faroese) and dialects (American English, British English), with the use of UM increasing over time relative to the use of UH. We also find that this pattern of change is generally led by women and more educated speakers. Finally, we propose a series of possible explanations for this surprising change in hesitation marker usage that is currently taking place across Germanic languages.
The conventional wisdom regarding the diachronic process whereby phonetic phenomena become phonologized appears to be the 'error accumulation' model, so called by Baker, Archangeli, and Mielke (2011). Under this model, biases in the phonetic context result in production or perception errors, which are misapprehended by listeners as target productions, and over time accumulate into new target productions. In this article, I explore the predictions of the hypocorrection model for one phonetic change (prevoiceless /ay/-raising) in detail. I argue that properties of the phonetic context underpredict and mischaracterize the contextual conditioning on this phonetic change. Rather, it appears that categorical, phonological conditioning is present from the very onset of this change.*
This article reviews the role phonology plays in phonetic changes. After first establishing what kinds of changes qualify as phonetic changes for the purposes of discussion, and laying out the theoretical outlook that is adopted here, I review the most obvious cases in which phonology plays a role in phonetic change. These include (a) the way phonological contrast can lead to phonetic dispersion, (b) the way phonological natural classes can define a set of segments to undergo a parallel phonetic shift, and (c) how phonological biases may lead to instances of underphonologization. Throughout, I discuss alternative approaches to these phenomena.
Abstract:This paper is equal parts methodological recommendation and an empirical investigation of the time dimensions of linguistic change. It is increasingly common in the sociolinguistic literature for researchers to utilize speech data which was collected over the course of many decades. These kinds of datasets contain three different time dimensions that researchers can utilize to investigate language change: i) the speakers' dates of birth, ii) the speakers' ages at the time of the recording, and iii) the date of the recording. Proper investigation of all three time dimensions is crucial for a theoretical understanding of the dynamics of language change. I recommend utilizing two dimensional tensor product smooths, fit over speakers' date of birth and the year of the recording, to analyze the contribution of these three time dimensions to linguistic changes. I apply this method to five language changes, based on data drawn from the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus. I find relatively weak evidence for lifespan effects in these changes, robust generational effects, and in one case, evidence of a zeitgeist effect.
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