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Columbia School Linguistics in the 21st Century
Edited by Nancy Stern, Ricardo Otheguy, Wallis Reid and Jaseleen Sackler
[Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics 77] 2019
► pp. 281–300

Evolutionary phonology as human behavior

| The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY)

In this chapter I compare Columbia School Phonology as first sketched in Diver (1974, 1979) to Evolutionary Phonology (Blevins, 2004a, 2005a, 2006a, 2008, 2009a, 2015, 2017), highlighting similarities and differences between the two approaches. Where Columbia School Phonology grazes the surface of phonological typology, Evolutionary Phonology grounds itself in extensive cross-linguistic surveys of common and rare sound patterns. Where Columbia School Phonology suggests relatively simplistic intuitive phonetic explanations for sound patterns, Evolutionary Phonology refers to detailed empirical work in distinct sub-fields of phonetics, including articulatory phonetics, aerodynamic modeling, and perceptual studies of speech. And where Columbia School Phonology proposes usage-based explanations for skewed distributions of sounds, Evolutionary Phonology suggests ways in which these are inadequate, and proposes analyses where non-phonetic factors interact in complex ways with overriding phonetic factors.

Keywords: Columbia School phonology, Evolutionary Phonology, phonological typology, functional phonology, skewings, phonetic explanation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.An overview of Evolutionary Phonology
  • 3.Evolutionary Phonology and the Columbia School: “Le bon Dieu est dans le détail”
    • 3.1Segment inventories: The high frequency of coronal sounds
    • 3.2Phonotactics: Explaining Tl-gaps
    • 3.3Neutralization: Where substance matters
  • 4.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 October 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sfsl.77.11ble
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