Accommodation Can Lead to Innovated Variation

Abstract

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2014) Accommodation can lead to innovated variation Jevon Heath University of California, Berkeley 1. Introduction The initiation of sound change requires the emergence of innovated variants. One possible source of innovated variants is non-faithful 1 transference of linguistic features during accommodation to a received speech signal. If the subphonemic cues associated with a phonological contrast are realized differently in an accommodating speaker's speech than in both the speaker's previous speech and in the signal to which they are accommodating, the resulting difference in phonetic realization may constitute a new variation. In this paper I argue that this sort of difference logically must happen in accommodation, at least for some speakers along some phonetic dimensions. I then report the results of a study demonstrating that such phonetic divergence in accommodation does happen in a laboratory environment, indicating that accommodation is a potential source of new phonetic variants. I conclude by situating these findings within extant work on sound change. To the extent that populations of individuals evince varying degrees of non- faithful transference of these cues, this study provides evidence for a potential approach to the actuation problem (Weinreich et al. 1968). 2. Background 2.1 Defining accommodation Accommodation is the phenomenon in which a person talks differently in response to external phonetic exposure. An often-reported example is the propensity of people calling their parents to revert to their speech. While talking differently is most commonly understood as talking more similarly to the received phonetic material (convergence), talking less similarly (divergence) has also been attested (cf. Giles 1971, Bourhis & Giles 1977, Babel 2010). However, divergence has only been evinced as moderated or intentional alteration of one's speech (cf. Bourhis & Giles 1977, Babel 2010), whereas convergence occurs both consciously and unconsciously (Bourhis & Giles 1977; Goldinger 1998). As such, convergence has commonly been considered default accommodative linguistic behavior. By non-faithful transference I mean a lack of phonetic fidelity between the signal perceived and the signal produced. I do not mean to invoke the idea of phonological faithfulness.