{"title":"Balancing social determinism vs. sound change","authors":"Roslyn Burns","doi":"10.1075/jhl.22012.bur","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper investigates the relationship between social and phonetic motivations for language change in Fang (Bantoid). While previous research has proposed that innovations in Fang arose due to social need and lack phonetic motivation ( Mve et al. 2019 ; Good, Di Carlo & Tschonghongei 2020 ), I propose that there is a phonetic motivation and the social situation, at best, was a pathway for the innovation to gain wider adoption in the population. I provide comparative and language-internal evidence that the Fang innovations are driven by two interconnected processes, palatalization and spirantization, triggered by high vowels. These processes have been obscured synchronically in part due to the phonemic merger of *i > ə in some parts of the paradigm, thus making the alternations look phonetically unmotivated.","PeriodicalId":42165,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Linguistics","volume":"80 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5000,"publicationDate":"2023-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Historical Linguistics","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.22012.bur","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract This paper investigates the relationship between social and phonetic motivations for language change in Fang (Bantoid). While previous research has proposed that innovations in Fang arose due to social need and lack phonetic motivation ( Mve et al. 2019 ; Good, Di Carlo & Tschonghongei 2020 ), I propose that there is a phonetic motivation and the social situation, at best, was a pathway for the innovation to gain wider adoption in the population. I provide comparative and language-internal evidence that the Fang innovations are driven by two interconnected processes, palatalization and spirantization, triggered by high vowels. These processes have been obscured synchronically in part due to the phonemic merger of *i > ə in some parts of the paradigm, thus making the alternations look phonetically unmotivated.
期刊介绍：
The Journal of Historical Linguistics aims to publish, after peer-review, papers that make a significant contribution to the theory and/or methodology of historical linguistics. Papers dealing with any language or language family are welcome. Papers should have a diachronic orientation and should offer new perspectives, refine existing methodologies, or challenge received wisdom, on the basis of careful analysis of extant historical data. We are especially keen to publish work which links historical linguistics to corpus-based research, linguistic typology, language variation, language contact, or the study of language and cognition, all of which constitute a major source of methodological renewal for the discipline and shed light on aspects of language change. Contributions in areas such as diachronic corpus linguistics or diachronic typology are therefore particularly welcome.
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