Variable Phonological Rules and ‘Quantal' Perception as a Source of Probabilistic Sound Change: The Case of Intervocalic Voicing in Old Tuscan

Abstract

The origin and nature of ‘irregular', ‘sporadic' sound changes have been debated by different theories of phonological change since at least the Neogrammarians. They are often attributed to non-phonological factors, as analogy or borrowing, or to the non-(purely)-phonological mechanism of lexical diffusion. The aim of this paper is to show that an irregular sound change in the historical phonology of Tuscan - namely the voicing of some intervocalic voiceless stops - is not due to borrowing (as often argued), but to a variable and allophonic voicing rule, whose output was only partially subject to phonological recategorization. The most likely causes for this irregular outcome are the variable strength intervocalic voicing had in different environments, the interaction with another lenition process and the perceptual ambiguity of the lenited stops.

Allophony of /ʝ/ in Peninsular Spanish

“…Exemplar models would seem to make this prediction (Bybee, 2002). This is, indeed, what we often find in diachrony, when phonological recategorization takes place (see Ohala, 1981, as well as, for instance, Canalis, 2015, andMeneses andAlbano, 2015, for recent proposals on phonological recategorization in sound change). Thus, in Western Romance, the phonologization of postvocalic voicing affected only word-internal stops and in Judeo-Spanish /b/ and /v/ merged as a consequence of postvocalic lenition only within words.…”