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Article published In:
Journal of Historical Linguistics
Vol. 7:3 (2017) ► pp.322–371

Odd conditions

Context-sensitive sound change in unexpected contexts

| ʻ

Since the 19th century linguists have expected to find conditioned sound changes in environments that make phonetic sense: consonants palatalize adjacent to front vowels, back vowels front if a front vowel occurs in the next syllable, stops voice between voiced segments, and so forth. Most conditioned sound changes conform to this expectation, but a surprising number do not. Some of these are well known, as the palatalization of *s before most word-initial consonants in High German. Since there is no obvious explanation for them, such changes are generally ignored in discussions of historical phonology. The result of this practice has been to give the false impression that what appear to be phonetically unmotivated sound changes are rare abnormalities that probably would conform to expectation if we had more information about them. This paper draws attention to examples of conditioning in Austronesian languages in which the phonetic properties of the context appear unrelated to those of the change, and it questions why such changes should occur. Although finding a completely satisfactory explanation has proven difficult, one general conclusion suggested by the data is that native speakers have an intuitive recognition of natural classes that is independent of phonetic motivation.

Keywords: sound change, conditioning, phonetic motivation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Aphonetic conditioning of sound change?
  • 3.Odd conditioning of vowel changes
    • 3.1Case study 1: Final /a/ mutation
    • 3.2Case study 2: Fronting of last syllable *u
    • 3.3Case study 3: *a > i adjacent *q in Kavalan
    • 3.4Case study 4: Vowel breaking in coastal Sarawak
    • 3.5Case study 5: Lowering of *u before high vowels in Sula
    • 3.6Case study 6: Low vowel dissimilation in Oceanic languages
  • 4.Odd conditioning of consonant changes
    • 4.1Case study 7: Backing of final labials to velars in Atayalic
    • 4.2Case study 8: Intervocalic labial to velar stop in Berawan
    • 4.3Case study 9: *g > p-, -j-, -p in Sa’ban
    • 4.4Case study 10: Gemination of an open final syllable onset in Berawan
    • 4.5Case study 11: Gemination of final consonants before a supporting vowel in Talaud
    • 4.6Case study 12: Atypical glide fortition in Narum
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 26 January 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.15013.blu
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