Competing Changes as a Cause of Residue

Citations Over TimeTop 1% of 1969 papers

Abstract

In the literature on sound change, much has been made of the neogrammarian doctrine that sound changes operate without exceptions. Without some such hypothesis any description would be a long list of unsystematic correspondences, with no assurance that the same sound under comparable conditions would not change into a variety of different sounds, with no governing principle whatsoever. This point of view, which Hockett has termed the 'regularity hypothesis', has been richly rewarding in historical research; as a celebrated part of the heritage of modern linguistics, the point needs no elaboration here. When irregularities appear to leak through the net of postulated phonetic laws, there should be an explanation for them. In the words of Karl Verner, 'There must be a rule for irregularity; the problem is to find it.' In searching for a rule that would explain certain residues of Grimm's Law, Verner found it necessary to go beyond the segmental environment into the accentual systems of IndoEuropean and Germanic, though the condition in the rule he discovered is still phonetic. In recent years, an impressive body of evidence has accumulated that there are diachronic rules which depend on conditions that are altogether nonphonetic, e.g. factors which are morphological and syntactic.' That this is so should not be surprising: in phonology, diachronic rules frequently leave counterparts in the form of synchronic rules, and there are numerous instances where synchronic rules are obviously dependent on 'grammatical prerequisites'. Furthermore, the stock of morphemes in a language is often partitioned into several layers according to non-phonetic criteria, where these layers exhibit different phonological behavior. To a large extent, such partitions correlate with the historical sources of the various layers, e.g. Romance versus native morphemes in English, or Chinese versus native morphemes in Japanese.

Related Papers

• Study on Extraction of Polysaccharides from Garlic Residue and the Hypolipidemic and Hypoglycemic Function of the Garlic Residue(2014)
• → Structural studies on the specific capsular polysaccharide from Rhizobium trifolii, TA-1(1973)42 cited
• A STUDY OF RESIDUE-RESIDUE CONTACTS IN GLOBULAR PROTEIN MOLECULES(2003)
• Oxidation of Residue from the Dyestuff Industry(2005)
• A multi-grain approach to protein (H3.1) structure in effective solvent with knowledge-based residue-residue interactions(2014)