The Neogrammarian hypothesis and pandemic irregularity [*] *
Take two
Robert Blust | University of Hawai’i University of Hawai’i
At least three types of sound change (prenasalization of obstruents, lenition of obstruents, conversion of labial
consonants to the corresponding labiovelars) are widespread in the Austronesian language family as sporadic innovations. What
marks these off as different from more familiar types of irregularity is their repeated occurrence across hundreds of related
languages, a phenomenon that can conveniently be called “pandemic irregularity.” All attempts to find an explanation for why
pandemic irregularities occur in terms of possibly unrecognized affixation, conditioning, borrowing, or unfinished processes, have
proven futile. In particular, it is stressed that pandemic irregularity in sound change is fundamentally different from “lexical
diffusion”, and deserves to be recognized in its own right as a process that works against the general application of the
regularity hypothesis.
Keywords: sound change, the Neogrammarian hypothesis, recurrent irregularity, Austronesian languages
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The Neogrammarian regularity hypothesis
- 2.1Regularity and exceptions in sound change
- 3.The evidence for pandemic irregularity
- 3.1Dempwolff’s “facultative nasal”
- 3.1.1The facultative nasal as a product of affixation
- 3.1.2The facultative nasal as a product of conditioned sound change
- 3.1.3The facultative nasal as a product of borrowing
- 3.1.4The facultative nasal as a sound change in progress
- 3.1.5Doubleting
- 3.1.6Sporadic denasalization
- 3.2The tripartite split of obstruents in Oceanic languages
- 3.3Convergence vs. inheritance
- 3.4Sporadic labiovelars in Oceanic languages
- 3.1Dempwolff’s “facultative nasal”
- 4.Summary and conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
Published online: 03 February 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.20027.blu
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.20027.blu
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