Abstract
The life cycle of phonological processes (e.g. Bermúdez-Otero 2015) provides an account of how a sound change might develop over the history of a language, from its beginnings in the pressures of speaking and hearing, through its progress to a cognitively-controlled process and maturation into a categorical phenomenon, to its final resting-place as a lexical or morphological pattern. It has been the subject of increased research in recent times, but has faced strikingly few challenges to its diachronic aspects, notably its predictions of unidirectionality and cycle-based dialectal splits. Furthermore, the cognitive mechanisms rooted in morpheme-based learning which are required to predict domain narrowing (phrase > word > stem) rather than broadening need to be tested through child (and adult) acquisition studies. This paper examines how a historical phonologist might go about interrogating the life-cycle model using extensive historical data spanning several centuries, and methodically ascertaining what the model predicts in order to know what to look for. The paper concludes by briefly addressing some of the many other questions raised by the model which have faced comparatively little investigation given the purported pervasiveness of the life cycle.
Highlights
The life cycle of phonological processes (e.g. Bermúdez-‐Otero 2015) provides an account of how a sound change might develop over the history of a language, from its beginnings in the pressures of speaking and hearing, through its progress to a cognitively-‐controlled process and maturation into a categorical phenomenon, to its final resting-‐place as a static lexical or morphological pattern
Stratal Optimality Theory (OT) has been contested by proponents of theories which deal with opaque interactions in synchronic phonology in other ways, and morphological theories which argue for the separation into a separate linguistic module of morphological patterns
Its proponents claim that “It should be as inconceivable for phonetic, phonological, and morphological research to proceed in ignorance of this life cycle as it is for research into morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics to Examining the life cycle of phonological processes ignore the facts of grammaticalization” (Bermúdez-‐Otero and Trousdale 2012), while acknowledging that the life cycle is not absolutely, but rather “largely unidirectional” (2012)
Summary
The life-‐cycle model presents numerous unaddressed questions. Three core predictions at the heart of the diachronic claims of the LCM are:. If communities speaking a language differ in the generalizations adopted by a new generation, a life-‐cycle-‐based dialect split is predicted to occur and be visible in the historical record even if no longer present. These challenging predictions must be tested by reliably detailed, long-‐term, cross-‐linguistic diachronic data in a manner that is hitherto absent. The three predictions above are at the heart of the LCM: sound changes are increasingly structuralized as they progress because learners can only generalize input in this way, resulting in different communities speaking the same language structuralizing at different rates. The three sections in this paper will focus on the issues relating to (1)–(3); questions (4)–(12) will be briefly discussed in §6, as several are better addressed with a non-‐diachronic focus, e.g. through phonetic experimentation
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