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Is sound change a natural consequence of the relationship between language and speech?| old_uid | 8421 |
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| title | Is sound change a natural consequence of the relationship between language and speech? |
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| start_date | 2010/03/23 |
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| schedule | 15h45-17h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle 1.63 |
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| summary | There is now considerable evidence that diachronic sound change is brought about by synchronic variation between a speaker and hearer, but the mechanisms by which the continuous fine-grained variation in speech communication give rise to categorical phonological change are not entirely understood. A related issue is that on the one hand sound change seems to take place incrementally at such a slow rate that much of it is quite possibly not noticeable: this is one of the reasons why sound change is unlikely to be teleological or planned. But at the same time a lack of teleology seems to be at variance with the evidence that the outcome of so much sound change (such as vowel chain shifts) is quite systematic. The starting point for breaking into this paradox will be a demonstration of some recent findings that the relationship between phonemes and the production/perception of speech is slightly different for each speaker. This misalignment between speakers even of the same dialect is one of the reasons why they hear coarticulatory relationships between speech sounds - that is the way that sounds overlap with each other in time - slightly differently: this, in turn, is argued to be one of the driving forces of sound change. For these reasons, sound change is, on the one hand, perpetual and can never reach a final goal. At the same time, since coarticulatory relationships are themselves lawfully governed by the capabilities and limitations of the vocal tract and hearing system, then so too are the possible phonological systems that they can give rise to. |
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| responsibles | Zondervan |
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