Ling 801 -- Historical Phonology

Autumn 2004 (Call No. 12200-6 -- 05 credit hours)

Contents

Description

This course is designed to introduce students to historical linguistics on an advanced level, concentrating on problems and methods in historical phonology. The question of causation of phonological change is considered carefully, both in relationship to the methodology employed in historical phonological analysis, and in relationship to the models of synchronic phonologies in the community (sociophonetics) and in the individual (psycholinguistics of the mental lexicon) that have been assumed in developing different methodologies.

The first part of the course will be a brief review of the comparative method and its theoretical foundations in the models of phonological grammars and of speech communities proposed by the Neogrammarians. The issues reviewed include the original arguments about why the method works, and what this tells us about the relationship between phonetic representations and phonological categories. Readings in these first weeks will be the relevant review articles on the comparative method in Joseph & Janda's (2003) Handbook of Historical Linguistics.

The second (and larger) part of the course will be a more in-depth exploration of relevant methodological and theoretical issues pertaining to demonstrations of the regularity of sound change and/or to the explanation of (apparent) counter-examples. Two sets of questions will be addressed in this part. First, what is the best way to understand the relationship between synchronic variation and sound change? In particular, how can quantitative sociolinguistic findings from modern speech communities apply to our understanding of the origin and the spread of sound change completed in the more or less distant past? Conversely, how can the model of this relationship proposed by Weinreich et al. (1968) and developed further in the extensive body of literature summarized in Labov (1994) inform phonological theory? Second, is "lexical diffusion" a distinct mechanism or merely a subtype of analogy or dialect borrowing? In particular, how does the choice of theory about the relationship of phonological grammar to mental lexicon constrain our understanding of the spread of sound change through the vocabulary of an individual speaker (in contrast to the spread of a sound change across the aggregate of speakers that constitute the speech community at any time during the course of a particular sound change in progress)? What are the constraints imposed by theory-internal assumptions about the phonological grammars of individual speakers in the different answers to this question proposed by Kiparsky (1994), Guy & Boyd (1990), Antilla (1997), Bybee (2000), and Pierrehumbert (2001). Readings in this part will include both relevant articles and book chapters that the entire class reads together and papers from individual term project bibliographies which each student does (for the most part) alone.

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Administration

Class Times and Locations:

Mondays and Wednesdays, 10:30-12:18, Derby 030.

Instructor:

Mary E. Beckman
office: room 07 Oxley, tel 292-9752
email: mbeckman@ling.osu.edu
office hours: Mondays at 2:00, Wednesdays at 9:00, & by appointment.

Coursework:

The coursework consists of four closely related components, and the course grade will be based on these four components as follows: (1) 20% on the assigned group readings; (2) 10% for leading the class on an individually chosen project-related reading; (3) 20% on two homework exercises; (4) 50% on five very brief term project reports.

  1. Assigned group readings: We will be reading and discussing one or two articles each week together in class, and an essential ongoing part of the coursework is to keep up with the readings and to contribute to the in-class discussion. To that end, each student should send the instructor a brief (three or four sentences) review of salient points in each reading, to collate into class notes which will be posted incrementally to the web page. This should be done before we discuss the reading. See the schedule of readings to see approximately when we will be covering each reading.
  2. Individual project-related reading: Also, each student will choose one of the readings from the annotated bibliography for his or her term project for all of us to read together, and will lead the discussion of that reading, producing notes in preparation for leading the class and/or summarizing the salient points from the class discussion, in a form that can be posted on this class web page.
  3. Homework exercises: Coursework in the first part includes two short homework exercises, using material drawn from Indo-European, although parallel phenomena in other reasonably well-studied language families will be emphasized in discussion. We will discuss these exercises together in class in conjunction with the initial review readings on the comparative method. See the schedule of assignments.
  4. Term project: Coursework in the second (larger) part includes the development of individual term projects: each student chooses a more specific question of personal interest, develops an annotated bibliography of relevant readings, and designs a study that could be done to address the chosen question. The study can involve any of the methodologies that we are covering. For example, it could be a reconstruction of some aspect of an older form of some language group using a corpus of cognate forms. It could be an experiment in the lab that examines the potential perceptual basis of some very common sound change. It could be a phonetic study in real time of a sound change in progress using a corpus of archived recordings. It could be sociophonetic study in apparent time of a sound change in progress that involves gathering primary data in the field. In this part of the course, then, there will be a succession of project reports on the term project. See the schedule of project report deadlines. (Note that this schedule assumes that the study will only be designed this quarter, and carried out at some later time -- e.g., as part of the preparation of a 3rd Year Paper or thesis research. However, any student who already has a relevant study at a fairly detailed level of development is encouraged to arrange with the instructor to adapt his or her schedule of project reports to make the completion of this study, rather than the design, be the term project.)

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    Schedule of readings

    The following list includes both assigned readings that everyone reads as part of the coursework and optional readings that students who are interested in the topic can read. The readings have been divided into eight sets. It is important to read the assigned readings in each set before the first of the class meetings where we're scheduled to discuss the topic in class, in order to make our collated notes be a useful starting point for discussion. By 6:00 a.m. on the day of the first class meeting, e-mail to the instructor (or relevant discussion leader in Week 7) a brief synopsis (two or three sentences) of salient points or questions for each assigned reading that we will be covering in class.

    (1) Weeks 1 & 2 (class meetings Sept. 27 & 29) -- The comparative method reviewed (1): the statistical arguments for its validity and the domain in which it works best. [Class meeting on Sept. 22 -- We will begin discussing the issues for this set of readings during the first class meeting, but notes for them will not be due until 6:00 a.m. on Sept. 27.]

    (2) Weeks 2 & 3 (class meetings Sept. 29, Oct. 4 & 6) -- The comparative method reviewed (2): the Neogrammarian hypothesis considered in light of the development of classical Generative Phonology and its relationship to phonetics. (3) Week 4 (class meetings Oct. 11 & 13) -- The challenge posed to classic modular accounts by observations of sound change in progress (1): diffusion of change through the speech community. (4) Week 5 (class meetings Oct. 18 & 20) -- The challenge posed to modular accounts by observations of sound change in progress (2): lexical diffusion. (5) Week 6 (class meetings Oct. 25 & 27) -- The challenge posed to modular accounts by observations of sound in progress (3): robustness of contrast, mergers, and near mergers. (6) Week 7 (class meetings Nov. 1 & 3 [instructor will be away]) -- Potpourri: papers chosen from individual term projects. E-mail your notes on each reading to the individual presenter by Oct. 30. Individual presenters should collate the notes, amplify on them after the discussion in class, and e-mail the final set of notes to the instructor by Nov. 6, to post on the class web site.]

    (7) Week 8 (class meetings Nov. 8 & 10) -- Two constraints-based approaches to recasting the modular account response to these challenges.

    (8) Weeks 9, 10, & 11 (class meetings Nov. 17, 22, & 29) -- Two constraints-based approaches that do not encapsulate lexicon from grammar. [No readings for Nov. 15 -- presentations of project data design. No discussion of reading on Dec. 1 -- final reports.] Back to top of page

    Schedule of homework assignments and project reports

    Here are the deadlines for the two homework assignments that we will all do in the first three weeks of the course and for interim reports during the six stages of progress for the individual term projects that we will each do in the second (larger) part of the course.

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    Useful links

    More links will be added here as the course progresses and we discover other web resources that are potentially relevant to the questions we are addressing as a group and/or in our individual term projects.

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    Address comments and queries about this page to: mbeckman@ling.osu.edu