Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

This dissertation provides an Optimality-Theoretic (OT: Prince & Smolensky 1993, McCarthy & Prince 1993) account of the evolution of the English obstruent inventory over an extended period of time, starting with Proto-Indo-European and ending with Early New English. By modeling the mechanism through which the PIE [voice] distinction in stops emerged as a Germanic [spread glottis] distinction, the analysis lends support to a recently established claim that [spread glottis], rather than [voice], is distinctive in stops in the majority of the Germanic languages (Iverson & Salmons 1995, Jessen 1998) OT, a non-derivational framework which provides a model of Universal Grammar (UG) significantly different from the earlier rule-based approaches, views language change as the reranking of hierarchically organized UG constraints on the well-formedness of output representations (Cho 1995, Berm dez-Otero 1995). The non-serial essence of OT makes it possible to describe parallel sound shifts, whereby a number of sound changes occur in parallel, rather than sequentially. For example, in Grimm's Law, p-b shifts to psg-p, whereby the contrast is preserved, yet it is has a different segmental composition. Specifically, it is demonstrated that a comprehensive analysis of language change, and, especially, parallel sound shifts, calls for the integration of two complementary approaches within OT: faithfulness (McCarthy & Prince 1995, and others) and dispersion (Flemming 1996, Padgett 1997). In the faithfulness framework, language change is viewed as a resolution of the conflict between the tendency to save articulatory effort and the preference for the faithful mapping of input representations to their output correspondents. In the dispersion framework, language change results from the conflict between articulatory effort minimization and the preference for a maximal perceptual contrast among output forms, with no reference to inputs. In more general terms, the dispersion interaction reflects the tendency to maintain a balanced inventory, whereas a faithfulness interaction implements the preference for a transparent (i.e., non-structure changing) inventory. The integration of the two approaches amounts to claiming that each individual output form experiences two competing pressures: to be different from or similar to other output forms, and to be identical to a corresponding input form. Unlike the proponents of the dispersion-based approach (e.g., Flemming 1998), who contend that the two approaches are incompatible, I demonstrate that dispersion and faithfulness are not only compatible, but complementary in accounting for language change. Dispersion constraints exercise a stabilizing effect on the inventory. By enforcing a fixed number of contrasts, the dispersion interaction thereby delimits the range of (or censors) possible faithfulness violations. The faithfulness constraints complement the dispersion interaction, by referring to an input as the reference point relative to which the output contrast is evaluated, so that the contrast which is minimally unfaithful to the input is selected as optimal. In other words, whereas dispersion is responsible for enforcing contrast itself, faithfulness is in charge of determining the adequate segmental composition of the contrast. The analysis reveals that the integrated dispersion/faithfulness framework has advantages over earlier linguistic approaches in accounting for the sound changes which have a perceptual origin, such as Grimm's Law and Verner's Law.