Hierarchical Inference in Sound Change: Words, Sounds, and Frequency of Use.

ABSTRACT: This paper aims examines the role of hierarchical inference in sound change. Through hierarchical inference, a language learner can distribute credit for a pronunciation between the intended phone and the larger units in which it is embedded, such as triphones, morphemes, words and larger syntactic constructions and collocations. In this way, hierarchical inference resolves the longstanding debate about the unit of sound change: it is not necessary for change to affect only sounds, or only words. Instead, both can be assigned their proper amount of credit for a particular pronunciation of a phone. Hierarchical inference is shown to generate novel predictions for the emergence of stable variation. Under standard assumptions about linguistic generalization, it also generates a counterintuiti

SUBMITTER: Kapatsinski V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8387583 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature