On Evolutionary Phonology

By B. Samuels. Biolinguistics, 2007

206 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As its name suggests, Evolutionary Phonology (EP; Blevins 2004) finds parallels in evolutionary biology. Blevins makes several mentions of Darwinian principles such as adaptation and in many cases utilizes language and reasoning that would not seem out of place in the evolutionary biology literature. However, she cautions that parallels to Darwin are necessarily " largely metaphorical " because phonological systems are learned, not transmitted in the DNA (xi). Here I think Blevins gives herself too little credit. Salikoko Mufwene (2001 et seq.) has made convincing arguments that languages can and should be viewed as species, with idiolects parallel to individual organisms, and that " [this] approach is analogical only to the extent that it is inspired by scholarship on biological evolution " (Mufwene 2005: 30). Certainly, the evolutionary jargon Blevins applies to linguistics is no more metaphorical than other such terms already in wide use, such as " genetic relatedness. " Elsewhere, such as in chapter 2's discussion of adaptation, the correct parallels with biology are less obviously helpful, as Blevins notes. She speaks of multiple dimensions of adaptativeness — one for ease of acquisition, one for ease of articulation, and one for ease of communication — but downplays the roles of adaptation, non-aptation, and disaptation in sound change. Probing this further could provide an interesting avenue of research; one gets the feeling that the story here may not be a simple one. The fundamental tenets of EP resonate with arguments made by the Neogrammarians, Otto Jespersen, Joseph Greenberg, and particularly Baudouin de Courtenay. These founding fathers of phonology were adamant that syn-chronic sound systems are best understood through the changes that produce them. Blevins also espouses this principle but differs from the tradition by rejecting teleology in sound change. For her, the only goal-directed processes that interact with pure phonological change are morphological analogy and the pressure to preserve paradigms where adhering to a regular sound change would cause paradigmatic contrasts to collapse. The elimination of teleology from phonology provides one way in which EP differs from the currently dominant paradigm in synchronic phonology, Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993). EP and OT also clash in another closely related domain, namely how the relative frequencies of various sound patterns should be explained. In OT,

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

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Citations in the corpus

Positional Neutralization: A Case Study from Child Language (2008, background): “…question of whether, as some scholars have argued, imperfect acquisition is the source, or a source, of diachronic change (see e.g. Lightfoot 1999, Blevins 2004, Albright 2005; cf. Honeybone 2005 for an opposing view); we do, however, strongly agree that some of the same phonetic factors affect…”
Variable affix order: Grammar and learning (2010, background): “…are imposed by the synchronic morphology as opposed to being diachronic artifacts with explanations in other domains (on piecing apart synchronic and diachronic explanation of typological generalizations, see e.g. Blevins 2004, Kiparsky 2006, Wilson 2006, Anderson 2008, and Moreton 2008).”
Variability in American English s-retraction suggests a solution to the actuation problem (2011, background): “Word-final devoicing, for instance, is a common sound change, and has straightforward articulatory and perceptual motivations (Blevins, 2004).”
Natural and Unnatural Constraints in Hungarian Vowel Harmony (2009, background): “The most forceful statements of the phonetic-precursor idea attribute all phonological patterning to channel bias (e.g. Ohala 1981, Blevins 2004).”
On the Learning of Arbitrary Phonological Rules (2005, background): “…this prima facie evidence against a strong bias for phonetically grounded rules, most phonological theories attempt to encode naturalness or markedness; for recent criticism of incorporating phonetic groundedness in phonological theory, see Hale and Reiss (2001), Buckley (2003), and Blevins (2004).”