Relative Frequency as a Determinant of Phonetic Change

Abstract

George Kingsley Zipf philology, can test for himself the validity of the theory in those corollary problems, the full treatment of which in this discussion I have for the sake of brevity been forced to forego. I should mention at the outset that the cumulative evidence in confirmation of my theory was at times of such embarrassing exactitude that I felt compelled to substitute, wherever relevant and attainable, the results of other investigators, made for quite different purposes. Since the results thus incorporated may not be known in every case to the reader, I consistently give necessary references, and, in cases of delayed publication, add the address of library or author. Needless to say, in approaching any such problem as that of mutation in language, one is at once beset by Streitfragen in the very field of Comparative Philology itself. Since it is my desire to establish the theory as far as possible on incontestable grounds, that it may in turn throw light on unsettled issues, I have studiously avoided treating any extraneous problem the solution of which is itself still quite obscure. Moreover, the new Gestalt psychology, which promises to be a boon to philology, I have been obliged, both from its present stage of infancy and from my own ignorance, to disregard almost entirely. But I add here that criticism from no point of view will be more welcome to me than from that of the Koehler-Wertheimer Gestalt psychologists. The presentation of my thesis is intended to begin with the simpler and less complicated sound-changes, proceeding by degrees to the subtler and more delicate.' 1 I need not say that the entire investigation, submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Ph.D. in Comparative Philology at Harvard University, would have been impossible without the friendly aid of others. First of all, I express my greatest thanks to Professor George H. Chase, Dean of the Graduate School of Harvard University, for his continued and strong encouragement, which alone sustained me through many hours of baffling theoretical work preliminary to the investigation of specific, linguistic changes. In gathering the great mass of statistical evidence I was helped considerably by the kindness of Professor Fuchs of the Sichsisches Stenographisches Landesamt, Dresden; Dr. Christian Johnen of Dtisseldorf; Mr.

Production planning and coronal stop deletion in spontaneous speech

“…While a basic relationship between reduction and probability has long been established (e.g., Jespersen, 1922;Zipf, 1929), this relationship has more recently become a central concern in the field, dubbed the 'Probabilistic Reduction Hypothesis ' in Jurafsky et al (2001) The idea is supported by findings that show that frequent words and words that are highly predictable in a certain context tend to be reduced in terms of their phonetic duration, and/or with respect to their segmental content. Such effects are often seen as a rational use of resources from an information-theoretic perspective: Highly probable words may be easier to retrieve for speakers during planning and easier to recover for listeners in perception (cf.…”

Linguistic variation, identity construction and cognition

“…Researchers have noted a relationship between phonetic reduction and token frequency (Bybee 2001;Zipf 1929) and there is some empirical evidence that such a relationship does indeed exist (Aylett & Turk 2004;Baker & Bradlow 2009;Bell et al 2009). There is also evidence that more frequent words are more likely to contain centralised vowels (Aylett & Turk 2006;Munson & Solomon 2004), which -if centralisation is viewed as phonetic reduction -also supports this argument.…”

Informativity affects consonant duration and deletion rates

“…Given no other information, frequent linguistic elements are more likely to occur than less frequent elements and can therefore be more easily recovered by listeners. If some information is available, for instance if the listeners know that they heard a voiceless stop, but do not know which one they heard, guessing that it was a /t/ makes a better guess than /k/ or /p/, since /t/ is more frequent than /k/ or /p/ in English (Zipf 1929).…”

“…Zipf (1929) claims that the reduction of frequent linguistic elements follows from usage -frequent elements are under a greater pressure to become efficient. Greater efficiency implies simplification and reduced duration.…”