Mergers in Bardi: contextual probability and predictors of sound change
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Sarah Babinski
Abstract
A crucial question for historical linguistics has been why some sound changes happen but not others. Recent work on the foundations of sound change has argued that subtle distributional facts about segments in a language, such as functional load, play a role in facilitating or impeding change. Thus not only are sound changes not all equally plausible, but their likelihood depends in part on phonotactics and aspects of functional load, such as the density of minimal pairs. Tests of predictability on the chance of phoneme merger suggest that phonemes with low functional load (as defined by minimal pair density) are more likely to merge, but this has been investigated only for a small number of languages with very large corpora and well attested mergers. Here we present work suggesting that the same methods can be applied to much smaller corpora, by presenting the results of a preliminary exploration of nine Australian languages, with a particular focus on Bardi, a Nyulnyulan language from Australia’s northwest. Our results support the hypothesis that the probability of merger is higher when phonemes distinguish few minimal pairs.
Acknowledgement
Many thanks to Andrew Wedel for his very helpful feedback on an earlier version of this paper. This work is funded by NSF, Funder Id: 10.13039/100000001, grant BCS-1423711.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Predictability and phonology: past, present and future
- Predictability and perception for native and non-native listeners
- Mergers in Bardi: contextual probability and predictors of sound change
- Predictability of stop consonant phonetics across talkers: Between-category and within-category dependencies among cues for place and voice
- Assessing predictability effects in connected read speech
- The interdependence of frequency, predictability, and informativity in the segmental domain
- Loci and locality of informational effects on phonetic implementation
- Three steps forward for predictability. Consideration of methodological robustness, indexical and prosodic factors, and replication in the laboratory
- Distributional learning is error-driven: the role of surprise in the acquisition of phonetic categories
- Truncation in message-oriented phonology: a case study using Korean vocative truncation
- Durational contrast in gemination and informativity
- Practice makes perfect: the consequences of lexical proficiency for articulation
- Patterns of probabilistic segment deletion/reduction in English and Japanese
- The role of predictability in shaping phonological patterns
Articles in the same Issue
- Predictability and phonology: past, present and future
- Predictability and perception for native and non-native listeners
- Mergers in Bardi: contextual probability and predictors of sound change
- Predictability of stop consonant phonetics across talkers: Between-category and within-category dependencies among cues for place and voice
- Assessing predictability effects in connected read speech
- The interdependence of frequency, predictability, and informativity in the segmental domain
- Loci and locality of informational effects on phonetic implementation
- Three steps forward for predictability. Consideration of methodological robustness, indexical and prosodic factors, and replication in the laboratory
- Distributional learning is error-driven: the role of surprise in the acquisition of phonetic categories
- Truncation in message-oriented phonology: a case study using Korean vocative truncation
- Durational contrast in gemination and informativity
- Practice makes perfect: the consequences of lexical proficiency for articulation
- Patterns of probabilistic segment deletion/reduction in English and Japanese
- The role of predictability in shaping phonological patterns
