Lexical Diffusion and Word Class

Abstract

The preceding chapters concentrated on the effect of word frequency on the lexical diffusion of various types of sound change, sometimes breaking the data down by phonetic environment and/or by word class. Not all writers who have appealed to lexical diffusion have kept these three influences — word frequency, phonetic environment, and word class — separate and thus have appealed to lexical diffusion when they found lexical exceptions of any kind or dismissed it when they found phonetic or grammatical conditioning, even if there were lexical exceptions. This confusion about the role of lexical diffusion is typified by Morin et al.’s (1990: 517) comment that if a rule they posited “had resulted from a regular sound change in which word-final [Ɔ] becomes [o], all words would have been affected simultaneously, or — in the case of lexical diffusion — without regard to grammatical categories.” Yet studies on lexical diffusion have never claimed that the spread of changes through the lexicon disregards grammatical categories. And many examples of lexical diffusion operating within the confines of narrow phonetic environment were presented in Chapter 3. The purpose of this chapter is to answer two questions: Why do some word classes undergo a sound change before others? Why do word frequency effects occur within word classes?KeywordsWord FrequencyWord FormFunction WordGrammatical CategoryWord ClassThese 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.