Part I: Preliminaries
Chapter 1: What is Evolutionary Phonology?
Phonology can be synchronic (concerned with what a speaker knows at any given time) or diachronic (concerned with sound changes through history).Blevins argues that there is no point in coming up with separate synchronic and diachronic explanations for the same phenomena: if there is a common sound change from A to B, and then A is found rarely but B commonly, then that is sufficient explanation.
Evolutionary Phonology is also not teleological: it doesn't assume that sound changes are trying to 'achieve' anything, like greater perceptibility or greater ease of articulation. They happen for phonetic reasons - mishearing is more likely to happen if perceptibility is low - but 'optimisation' is an "emergent, non-deterministic" property of the sound changes.
Chapter 2: Evolution in language and elsewhere
This book is not about the evolution of humans to use phonology. This book uses evolution as a metaphor for the kinds of changes that language undergoes.Evidence for continuous change in living creatures includes: varieties of domesticated plants and animals; varieties and distributions of wild creatures; the fossil record. By analogy, language has varieties propagated by spelling pronunciation and prescriptivism; varieties of natural languages; the written record.
Types of sound change:
- ᴄʜᴀɴɢᴇ (Mishearing)
- ᴄʜᴀɴᴄᴇ (Correctly perceived but intrinsically phonologically ambiguous)
- ᴄʜᴏɪᴄᴇ (Variety of phonetic signals available; different protoype/exemplar chosen)
Sound change is not optimal. As mutation in genes is random, so sound changes are not directed (though misperceptions may be more phonetically shaped, this is not a change which makes the phonology 'more fit for purpose').
Similarity can arise from:
- Direct inheritance
- Convergent evolution (superficially similar only)
- Parallel evolution (similar ancestral conditions and environment result in similar features)
- Physical constraints (synchronic constraint systems)
Chapter 3: Explanation in phonology: a brief history of ideas
Historical explanation
- Indic grammarians (including Pāṇini, c. 0AD) made comprehensive descriptions, but no explanations.
- Neogrammarians (c. C19) mostly focussed on historical explanations; synchronic features were "useful descriptive devices, not...explanations in and of themselves".
- Baudoin de Courtenay (c. 1870) mixed the two.
- Saussure (c.1950), who had a large influence on modern linguistics, was foccussed only on synchronic patterns.
Teleological explanation
'Teleological' means 'goal-directed'.
The idea that sound change was teleological was common in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, and is common among various modern (generative) linguistic theories, usually as 'markedness', including Optimality Theory.
It was rejected by the neogrammarians, and broadly by modern historical linguists.