Chapter 2 Word Frequency in Lexical Diffusion and the Source of Morphophonological Change

Abstract

Abstract Two ideas that have been around for almost a century need to be reexamined in the light of existing theories of linguistic change. These ideas involve the relationship between word frequency and morphophonological change. Morphophonological change can be divided into sound change, which is largely, perhaps entirely, phonetically motivated, and analogy, which is primarily conceptually motivated. This chapter argues that the relation between sound change and word frequency is just the reverse of the relation between analogy and word frequency. That is, sound changes affect the most frequent lexical items first. Infrequent items are the most resistant to phonetically motivated change, while frequent items are the most resistant to conceptually motivated change. This chapter considers the role of the child versus the adult speaker in the initiation of linguistic change.