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Where have all the sound changes gone? Phonological stability and mechanisms of sound change

  • Claire Bowern ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 17. Juni 2022

Abstract

When do the mechanisms of regular sound change fail to apply? What types of languages and situations exhibit and promote phonological stability? I consider these questions using data from the languages of Aboriginal Australia, where there has been debate on this question. I show that the standard explanations are inadequate, and possible solutions have not yet been empirically investigated. Given how many of these languages are already either no longer spoken or severely under threat, it is important to investigate these questions urgently.


Corresponding author: Claire Bowern, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA, E-mail:

Award Identifier / Grant number: BCS-1423711

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Luisa Miceli, Erich Round, David Nash, Jason Shaw, Peter Austin, and audiences at SUNY Stony Brook and the University of Arizona for discussion of an earlier version of this manuscript.

  1. Research funding: This work was funded in part by NSF grant BCS-1423711.

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Received: 2021-05-17
Accepted: 2021-06-15
Published Online: 2022-06-17

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Artikel in diesem Heft

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Research Articles
  3. Introduction to sound change in endangered or small speech communities
  4. Where have all the sound changes gone? Phonological stability and mechanisms of sound change
  5. Where have all the sound changes gone? Examining the scarcity of evidence for regular sound change in Australian languages
  6. Cross-dialectal synchronic variation of a diachronic conditioned merger in Tlingit
  7. Vowel harmony in Laz Turkish: a case study in language contact and language change
  8. The evolution of tonally conditioned allomorphy in Triqui: evidence from spontaneous speech corpora
  9. Sound change and gender-based differences in isolated regions: acoustic analysis of intervocalic phonemic stops by Bora-Spanish bilinguals
  10. Place uniformity and drift in the Suzhounese fricative and apical vowels
  11. Flexibility and evolution of cue weighting after a tonal split: an experimental field study on Tamang
  12. The emergence of bunched vowels from retroflex approximants in endangered Dardic languages
  13. The expanding influence of Thai and its effects on cue redistribution in Kuy
  14. Speech style variation in an endangered language
  15. Sound change in Aboriginal Australia: word-initial engma deletion in Kunwok
  16. The dental-alveolar contrast in Mapudungun: loss, preservation, and extension
  17. Sound change or community change? The speech community in sound change studies: a case study of Scottish Gaelic
  18. Phonetic transfer in Diné Bizaad (Navajo)
  19. The evolution of flap-nasalization in Hoocąk
  20. Sound change and tonogenesis in Sylheti
  21. Exploring variation and change in a small-scale Indigenous society: the case of (s) in Pirahã
  22. Rhotics, /uː/, and diphthongization in New Braunfels German
  23. Generational differences in the low tones of Black Lahu
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