Lexical and sublexical effects on diachronic stability and instability of phonological systems: a case study on Proto-Indo-European dorsal stops

• Autores: Frederik Hartmann
• Localización: Lingua: International review of general linguistics, ISSN 0024-3841, Nº 273, 2022
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Lexical and sublexical conditions such as a word’s phonological contrast to other words in a lexicon or the informativity of a segment in its context can influence the likelihood that certain linguistic changes occur. This paper sets out to investigate whether the effects of segment informativity and segment contrast apply to larger sets of phonological units, thus contributing to the diachronic stability or instability of natural classes or phonological series in a language. The test case for this analysis are the Proto-Indo-European dorsal stops and laryngeal series which underwent iconic changes in many daughter languages. The investigation replicates previous findings and shows that phonological contrast and segment informativity have contributed to the changes and pathways of these Proto-Indo-European consonant series. As a result, the findings suggest that lexical and sublexical effects can contribute in part to the diachronic stability of larger phonological units in a language.