Origins of Sound Change

Explanations for sound change have traditionally focused on identifying the inception of change, that is, the identification of perturbations of the speech signal, conditioned by physiological constraints on articulatory and/or auditory mechanisms, which affect the way speech sounds are analyzed by the listener. While this emphasis on identifying the nature of intrinsic variation in speech has provided important insights into the origins of widely attestedcross-linguistic sound changes, the nature of phonologization - the transition from intrinsic phonetic variation to extrinsic phonological encoding - remains largely unexplored.This volume showcases the current state of the art in phonologization research, bringing together work by leading scholars in sound change research from different disciplinary and scholarly traditions. The authors investigate the progression of sound change from the perspectives of speech perception, speech production, phonology, sociolinguistics, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, computer science, statistics, and social and cognitive psychology. The book highlights the fruitfulness ofcollaborative efforts among phonologists and specialists from neighbouring disciplines in seeking unified theoretical explanations for the origins of sound patterns in language, as well as improved syntheses of synchronic and diachronic phonology.

The collection presents fascinating insights and raises intriguing further questions ... This book will be of interest not only to a readership in historical linguistics or phonology, but also to researchers and students in other disciplines interested in sound change, The aspiring diachronic phonologist will find many avenues here worthy of further pursuit, and the more seasoned scholar will be heartened by the new models of phonologisation that have emerged out of a synthesis between cutting-edge computational and experimental method.

Alan C. L. Yu is Associate Professor of Linguistics and the College and the University of Chicago. He also directs the Phonology Laboratory and the Washo Documentation Project. His research focuses on phonological theory, phonetics, language typology, and language variation and change. He is the author of A Natural History of Infixation (2007, Oxford University Press) and co-editor of the Blackwell Handbook of Phonological Theory 2nd Edition(Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).