Productivity and Regularity in Synchronic Phonology
In the same way, synchronic phonology is also regular, and describable through the same sorts of rules as diachronic phonology (though we should note that these are not describing the same object - synchronic phonological rules describe processes happening in a single human brain, while diachronic sound rules describe relationships between grammars that exist at different points in time, a meta-analysis, hence de Saussure’s famous argument about the primacy of synchrony over diachrony).
What this means, in the context of the current conversation, is that if, as you say, the “phonetic easing” process is still active in modern English, you need to be able to provide a regular, exceptionless environment that can describe it.
You’ve attempted to do this to some degree with your consonant deletion examples (even if your proposed pronunciations for strong “the” and “to” are pretty dicey), but in order to prove that the sound law that produced the a/an alternation is still a regular phonotactic constraint in Modern English, you’ll have to provide a regular synchronic sound rule that can exceptionlessly describe the phonetic environment of the constraint in question that leads to the deletion, which I don’t think you’ll be able to do.
Note that your proposed rule must not be specific to individual lexical items or refer to morphological or syntactic boundaries. This is because:
Structure is not Visible to Phonology - the Modularity of the Grammar
It’s traditionally assumed by most generative linguists that the grammar is largely modular - that is, each phase of the generation of an utterance is separate, and proceeds one at a time with little overlap between the modules. So, syntax first builds the structure of the clause, and then morphology (which does not have access to the syntactic structure (though see Distributed Morphology for modern attempts to unite syntax and morphology)) builds words to fit into the structural positions that syntax built, and then phonology (which similarly cannot see either syntactic or morphological structure) determines the sounds that are sent off to be pronounced by the articulators. (Note that the actual relationships are a bit more complex - see Kiparsky’s 1982 book on Cyclic/Lexical Phonology for a famous example that’s pretty accessible, but the generalization holds well enough for the data we’re dealing with here.)
What this means is that synchronic (and diachronic, for that matter) sound rules only ever apply in phonological environments, that is, to strings of phones and suprasegmental features like tone, stress, etc. (which does include prosody), and not to individual words.
So, in order for the “ease of pronunciation” constraint you’re referring to here to still be active in Modern English, it must be describable as a phonological rule that applies exceptionlessly in a specific phonological environment, regardless of the words or structures that are actually present.
This is why I don’t think you’ll be able to show that the a/an alternation is still a regular, productive alternation in Modern English. The a/an alternation is not predictable - there is no general rule in English phonology of which its behavior is a subset. A child acquiring English just has to learn that for this specific morpheme, there’s an “n” before vowels and no “n” before consonants, and, crucially, no generally describable phonological sequence in the language works this way.
We can test this with the analogy and borrowing tests above. First, through the analogy test, “my/mine” no longer behaves this way, because its behavior has been altered through a combination of analogy and grammaticalization - the sound law clearly no longer holds in its environment, so the phonotactic constraint that produced it is no longer active in the language. Second, and this is admittedly a hypothetical, I don’t believe that any new monosyllabic word borrowed into English ending in -an (or -uw or -ij, for that matter) would show the same alternation in any environment, which would again indicate that the phonotactic constraint is no longer active.
All of this is because the regular sound change that originally produced this alternation is really just as fossilized as the medial f/v alternation: neither alternation can be successfully described using exceptionless synchronic sound rules, and must therefore be stored in the lexicon (“fossilized”) and learned as exceptions by new acquirers.
I hope this makes sense. Sorry if this was way too much info - it felt nostalgic, like being back in front of my third- and fourth-year undergrad students again, and I got a bit carried away. Also, I like your username. :)
Let me know if anything here is unclear or if you have further questions.
First, I got most of my linguistics education in German so sorry for my bad example when I was looking for an English one. If that’s OK, I would use German ones from now on and try to give enough context.
Neogrammarian Hypothesis
I’m aware of this school of thought, I just didn’t know people still subscribe to it. The narrative I was tought in uni was that when linguists found the first sound shift (Grimm’s Law) and the second one (High German Consonant Shift) and the one in between (Verner’s Law), they were hyped and felt they can math out everything, like a world formula, everything can be determined. But at some point, they realized it’s much more messy and while there certainly are rules that work at a birds view level, the devil is in the detail and this approach can’t explain every individual word. This might be a philosophical question tho: Is everything regular but we don’t know all the rule or are there “real” exceptions?
I’m aware of borrowing and analogy but a factor you forgot to address is frequency. Frequently used words tend to get shortened and infrequently used words get more regular. I know this happens in English as well, but I rather use a German example than a bad English one: “haben” used to mean “to own” but when it became an auxiliary verb (as “to have” did in English), many forms got shortened and now form a paradigm unique in German (there is no analogy here). The “b” is omitted in 2nd and 3rd singular but not in 2nd plural which normally is the same as 3sg. Also: 1pl “(wir) haben” turns colloquial to “ham” while infinite and 3pl stay “haben”. No regular sound shift or analogy or borrowing, just shortening of frequent words.
Verbs will shift between strong and weak conjugation: “küren” used to mean “to choose” and was a strong verb, now it has a specific meaning “to reward someone in a competition” and is more regular (unlike your outdated Sturtevant’s Paradox paper suggests ;) ). “Preisen” (to praise) is a loan word that turned into a strong verb.
And I know strong/weak verbs are analogy (while “haben” is not!), this points to a misunderstanding we seem to have: when I say “regular” I mean deterministic, you seem to mean there is a pool of rules you can pick and choose (different ways to get less regular for example). Chess is rule based as in you can’t just move anywhere but there are still many options and maybe you castle a second time and no one notices. In German we sometimes differentiate between “Labyrinth” and “Irrgarten”. In the former, there is always only one path but you feel lost anyway. This is how my 19th century countrymen thought of language change. In the latter, you have many crossroads and can end up in different places. I hope this analogy makes sense. I don’t know if this difference also exists in English. And honesty, your “analogy to written language” (which I would rather call hypercorrectism but you can argue it’s an analogy) is so arbitrary, at that point you can just argue anything and call it a rule, which is fine, there certainly is influence which I would rather call a tendency than a rule. BTW you could as well argue that this is loaned from a dialect that didn’t make the shift but I don’t know the data for that, might be wrong.
So, in order for the “ease of pronunciation” constraint you’re referring to here to still be active in Modern English, it must be describable as a phonological rule that applies exceptionlessly in a specific phonological environment, regardless of the words or structures that are actually present.
You repeat that like a dogma but don’t give any logical explanation. As I tried to illustrate above, next to the bird eye view of regular sound shifts, frequent words will often work in their own logic because the more frequent a word is, the more important to – you guessed it – ease its pronunciation. I don’t see how “easing the pronunciation” only applies to regular sound shifts and not to the shortening of frequent words (which also is part of language change).
Or to put it differently: I think you said at one point that it is a relic that used to ease the pronunciation but not anymore. Is that a statement you agree to? Because if so, when did it stop to do that and turned into a relic? That’s what I meant when I said you make it into a dichotomy: it’s a continuum and the a/an alteernation is closer to its beginning than to fossilization because it certainly still does the job and follows the same rule it used to, even tho it is the only word that follows this rule. If it only occurs in some lexemes (and I don’t mean the lexeme “a” but the following one), then it is fossilized. Makes me wonder: Do you say “another” in your variety or “a other”? Because that would rather fit the v/f-example for me (especially if the “o” shifted to “wa” and there was no hiatus eitherway, just to illustrate my point not that this was a likely shift).
So sum things up:
There are different processes at play in language change
They are rule based in the sense that we can describe and label the rules, but not in the sense that they are deterministic
Some processes have the purpose to ease the pronunciation, these include regular sound changes and shortening of frequent words
regular sound changes gave us “one”, shortening of frequent words gave us “a(n)”, the 5th most frequent word of the English language and counting
the a/an alternation is very much rule based and in every instance it occurs, it demonstrably eases the pronunciation
This does not mean that it is a regular sound shift. It never was. It always only effected this one word
Sound changes and “easing the pronunciation” is not synonymous and the implication goes in neither direction. This is beside the point but some shifts have the benefit on the listener’s side, not necessarily the speaker’s
It’s traditionally assumed by most generative linguists that the grammar is largely modular - that is, each phase of the generation of an utterance is separate, and proceeds one at a time with little overlap between the modules.
Not that this matters to my argument but a little “fun fact” about me: While most of my lectures were given by generative linguists, my master thesis was about Role and Reference Grammar, a framework that explicitly tries to link morphology, syntax and pragmatics more closely together (phonology explicitly not tho). I currently read a book that includes prototype theory from cognitive linguistics which also is created in opposition to generative linguistics. I know this is still the predominant school of thought but I wish it wasn’t. My master thesis was in Applied Computer Linguistics (with a strong emphasis on “computer” on my part tbh) and I also worked with Sumerian there too as you might have guessed :)
But to your point: If your theoretical framework doesn’t allow something that happens, isn’t that rather bad for the framework than for reality? Some famous guy once said: All models are wrong but some models are useful. Well, yours doesn’t seem to be in this instance.
Productivity and Regularity in Synchronic Phonology
In the same way, synchronic phonology is also regular, and describable through the same sorts of rules as diachronic phonology (though we should note that these are not describing the same object - synchronic phonological rules describe processes happening in a single human brain, while diachronic sound rules describe relationships between grammars that exist at different points in time, a meta-analysis, hence de Saussure’s famous argument about the primacy of synchrony over diachrony).
What this means, in the context of the current conversation, is that if, as you say, the “phonetic easing” process is still active in modern English, you need to be able to provide a regular, exceptionless environment that can describe it.
You’ve attempted to do this to some degree with your consonant deletion examples (even if your proposed pronunciations for strong “the” and “to” are pretty dicey), but in order to prove that the sound law that produced the a/an alternation is still a regular phonotactic constraint in Modern English, you’ll have to provide a regular synchronic sound rule that can exceptionlessly describe the phonetic environment of the constraint in question that leads to the deletion, which I don’t think you’ll be able to do.
Note that your proposed rule must not be specific to individual lexical items or refer to morphological or syntactic boundaries. This is because:
Structure is not Visible to Phonology - the Modularity of the Grammar
It’s traditionally assumed by most generative linguists that the grammar is largely modular - that is, each phase of the generation of an utterance is separate, and proceeds one at a time with little overlap between the modules. So, syntax first builds the structure of the clause, and then morphology (which does not have access to the syntactic structure (though see Distributed Morphology for modern attempts to unite syntax and morphology)) builds words to fit into the structural positions that syntax built, and then phonology (which similarly cannot see either syntactic or morphological structure) determines the sounds that are sent off to be pronounced by the articulators. (Note that the actual relationships are a bit more complex - see Kiparsky’s 1982 book on Cyclic/Lexical Phonology for a famous example that’s pretty accessible, but the generalization holds well enough for the data we’re dealing with here.)
What this means is that synchronic (and diachronic, for that matter) sound rules only ever apply in phonological environments, that is, to strings of phones and suprasegmental features like tone, stress, etc. (which does include prosody), and not to individual words.
So, in order for the “ease of pronunciation” constraint you’re referring to here to still be active in Modern English, it must be describable as a phonological rule that applies exceptionlessly in a specific phonological environment, regardless of the words or structures that are actually present.
This is why I don’t think you’ll be able to show that the a/an alternation is still a regular, productive alternation in Modern English. The a/an alternation is not predictable - there is no general rule in English phonology of which its behavior is a subset. A child acquiring English just has to learn that for this specific morpheme, there’s an “n” before vowels and no “n” before consonants, and, crucially, no generally describable phonological sequence in the language works this way.
We can test this with the analogy and borrowing tests above. First, through the analogy test, “my/mine” no longer behaves this way, because its behavior has been altered through a combination of analogy and grammaticalization - the sound law clearly no longer holds in its environment, so the phonotactic constraint that produced it is no longer active in the language. Second, and this is admittedly a hypothetical, I don’t believe that any new monosyllabic word borrowed into English ending in -an (or -uw or -ij, for that matter) would show the same alternation in any environment, which would again indicate that the phonotactic constraint is no longer active.
All of this is because the regular sound change that originally produced this alternation is really just as fossilized as the medial f/v alternation: neither alternation can be successfully described using exceptionless synchronic sound rules, and must therefore be stored in the lexicon (“fossilized”) and learned as exceptions by new acquirers.
(Note: Both of these alternations are morphologically/lexically-conditioned allomorphy, if you’re interested.)
I hope this makes sense. Sorry if this was way too much info - it felt nostalgic, like being back in front of my third- and fourth-year undergrad students again, and I got a bit carried away. Also, I like your username. :)
Let me know if anything here is unclear or if you have further questions.
First, I got most of my linguistics education in German so sorry for my bad example when I was looking for an English one. If that’s OK, I would use German ones from now on and try to give enough context.
I’m aware of this school of thought, I just didn’t know people still subscribe to it. The narrative I was tought in uni was that when linguists found the first sound shift (Grimm’s Law) and the second one (High German Consonant Shift) and the one in between (Verner’s Law), they were hyped and felt they can math out everything, like a world formula, everything can be determined. But at some point, they realized it’s much more messy and while there certainly are rules that work at a birds view level, the devil is in the detail and this approach can’t explain every individual word. This might be a philosophical question tho: Is everything regular but we don’t know all the rule or are there “real” exceptions?
I’m aware of borrowing and analogy but a factor you forgot to address is frequency. Frequently used words tend to get shortened and infrequently used words get more regular. I know this happens in English as well, but I rather use a German example than a bad English one: “haben” used to mean “to own” but when it became an auxiliary verb (as “to have” did in English), many forms got shortened and now form a paradigm unique in German (there is no analogy here). The “b” is omitted in 2nd and 3rd singular but not in 2nd plural which normally is the same as 3sg. Also: 1pl “(wir) haben” turns colloquial to “ham” while infinite and 3pl stay “haben”. No regular sound shift or analogy or borrowing, just shortening of frequent words.
Verbs will shift between strong and weak conjugation: “küren” used to mean “to choose” and was a strong verb, now it has a specific meaning “to reward someone in a competition” and is more regular (unlike your outdated Sturtevant’s Paradox paper suggests ;) ). “Preisen” (to praise) is a loan word that turned into a strong verb.
And I know strong/weak verbs are analogy (while “haben” is not!), this points to a misunderstanding we seem to have: when I say “regular” I mean deterministic, you seem to mean there is a pool of rules you can pick and choose (different ways to get less regular for example). Chess is rule based as in you can’t just move anywhere but there are still many options and maybe you castle a second time and no one notices. In German we sometimes differentiate between “Labyrinth” and “Irrgarten”. In the former, there is always only one path but you feel lost anyway. This is how my 19th century countrymen thought of language change. In the latter, you have many crossroads and can end up in different places. I hope this analogy makes sense. I don’t know if this difference also exists in English. And honesty, your “analogy to written language” (which I would rather call hypercorrectism but you can argue it’s an analogy) is so arbitrary, at that point you can just argue anything and call it a rule, which is fine, there certainly is influence which I would rather call a tendency than a rule. BTW you could as well argue that this is loaned from a dialect that didn’t make the shift but I don’t know the data for that, might be wrong.
You repeat that like a dogma but don’t give any logical explanation. As I tried to illustrate above, next to the bird eye view of regular sound shifts, frequent words will often work in their own logic because the more frequent a word is, the more important to – you guessed it – ease its pronunciation. I don’t see how “easing the pronunciation” only applies to regular sound shifts and not to the shortening of frequent words (which also is part of language change).
Or to put it differently: I think you said at one point that it is a relic that used to ease the pronunciation but not anymore. Is that a statement you agree to? Because if so, when did it stop to do that and turned into a relic? That’s what I meant when I said you make it into a dichotomy: it’s a continuum and the a/an alteernation is closer to its beginning than to fossilization because it certainly still does the job and follows the same rule it used to, even tho it is the only word that follows this rule. If it only occurs in some lexemes (and I don’t mean the lexeme “a” but the following one), then it is fossilized. Makes me wonder: Do you say “another” in your variety or “a other”? Because that would rather fit the v/f-example for me (especially if the “o” shifted to “wa” and there was no hiatus eitherway, just to illustrate my point not that this was a likely shift).
So sum things up:
Not that this matters to my argument but a little “fun fact” about me: While most of my lectures were given by generative linguists, my master thesis was about Role and Reference Grammar, a framework that explicitly tries to link morphology, syntax and pragmatics more closely together (phonology explicitly not tho). I currently read a book that includes prototype theory from cognitive linguistics which also is created in opposition to generative linguistics. I know this is still the predominant school of thought but I wish it wasn’t. My master thesis was in Applied Computer Linguistics (with a strong emphasis on “computer” on my part tbh) and I also worked with Sumerian there too as you might have guessed :)
But to your point: If your theoretical framework doesn’t allow something that happens, isn’t that rather bad for the framework than for reality? Some famous guy once said: All models are wrong but some models are useful. Well, yours doesn’t seem to be in this instance.