Applications of Lexical Diffusion

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how an understanding of lexical diffusion can contribute to studies of other sound changes, both in interpreting manuscript variation and in determining the motivation behind a particular sound change. Lexical diffusion has also been enlisted to reconstruct the diachronic path that led to the synchronic variation in earlier stages of the language. Principled arguments for the role of lexical diffusion in the progression of particular sound changes have been made, for instance, by Barrack (1998: 209–13) for Siever’s Law and by Salmons and Iverson (1993) for the variation between «Þ1» and «fl» in Gothic. Barrack was able to discard Seebold’s (1972) theory of two suffixes -iya- and -ya- in Vedic Sanskrit and to explain two types of “skewed variation” involving the shift of -iya- to -ya- from pre-Vedic to Classical Sanskrit: In every case the degree of denuclearization in light and heavy stems forms a staggered pattern: Denuclearization in light stems always advances in a roughly proportional manner over the analogous loss in heavy stems of the same morphosyntactic category. Thus the theory of lexical diffusion provides a credible, unitary account of the anomaly of skewed variation, (pp. 212–13) KeywordsFrequent WordFunction WordWord ClassShort VowelSkewed VariationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.