Inhibited sound change: An evolutionary approach to lexical competition

Blevins, Juliette; Wedel, Andrew

doi:10.1075/dia.26.2.01ble

Article published In: Diachronica
Vol. 26:2 (2009) ► pp.143–183

Get fulltext from our e-platform

Download PDF

Inhibited sound change

An evolutionary approach to lexical competition

Juliette Blevins | Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Andrew Wedel | University of Arizona

Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 30 July 2009

https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.26.2.01ble

The study of regular sound change reveals numerous types of exceptionality. The type studied here has the profile of regular sound change, but appears to be inhibited where homophony would result. The most widely cited cases of this phenomenon are reviewed and new cases presented. If sound change can be inhibited by impending homophony, how is this to be represented and understood? Here we offer a model of variation-based sound change where category evolution incorporates lexical competition. Lexical Character Displacement predicts accentuation of differences among similar words when syntagmatic disambiguation is limited. In the cases under discussion, this accentuation inhibits merger. However, as we show, the same principle can inhibit sound change altogether, or give rise to extreme phonological contrasts under similar conditions.

Keywords: simulation, sound change, exceptionality, category evolution, anti-homophony, lexical competition, Evolutionary Phonology, character displacement

Cited by (61)

Cited by 61 other publications

Order by:

Xavier Bach, Louise Esher & Sascha Gaglia

2025. Comparative and Dialectal Approaches to Analogy,

Bundgaard-Nielsen, Rikke Louise, Robert Mailhammer, Brett Baker, Yizhou Wang, Mark Harvey & Chloe Turner

2025. Lenition, fortition, and lexical access in Iwaidja and Mawng. Laboratory Phonology 16:1

Dinkin, Aaron J. & Meredith Tamminga

2025. Searching for homophony avoidance in English coronal stop deletion. Phonology 42

Hartmann, Frederik

2025. Causality in Language Change. In Reference Module in Social Sciences,

Paschen, Ludger

2025. Acoustic disambiguation of homophonous morphs is exceptional. Journal of Linguistics ► pp. 1 ff.

Yu, Alan C.L., Vivian Guo Li & Peggy P.K. Mok

2025. Contextual and paradigmatic effects on suspended contrast across generations: The case of Cantonese pinjam revisited. Journal of Phonetics 110 ► pp. 101412 ff.

Blevins, Juliette & Michela Cresci

2024. Variant patterns of sibilant debuccalization in Camuno. Journal of Historical Linguistics

Blum, Frederic, Carlos Barrientos, Adriano Ingunza & Johann-Mattis List

2024. Cognate reflex prediction as hypothesis test for a genealogical relation between the Panoan and Takanan language families. Scientific Reports 14:1

Bowern, Claire, John Charles Smith, Betsy Sneller, Meredith Tamminga, Jadranka Gvozdanović, John A. Goldsmith, Götz Keydana & Juliette Blevins

2024. Diachrony and Diachronica. Diachronica 41:1 ► pp. 127 ff.

Burroni, Francesco & Sireemas Maspong

2024. Re-examining initial geminates. In Historical Linguistics 2019 [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 367], ► pp. 109 ff.

De Smet, Isabeau & Laura Rosseel

2024. Who’s afraid of homophones? A multimethodological approach to homophony avoidance. Language and Cognition 16:3 ► pp. 600 ff.

Puggaard-Rode, Rasmus, Henrik Jørgensen & Camilla Søballe Horslund

2024. A diachronic account of Present Day Standard Danish stop gradation. Diachronica 41:5 ► pp. 678 ff.

武, 嘉毅

2024. Analyzing Vowel Nasalization in Phonological Shifts—Taking the Jin Dialects of Chinese and French as Examples. Modern Linguistics 12:04 ► pp. 668 ff.

Blevins, Juliette & Ander Egurtzegi

2023. Refining explanation in Evolutionary Phonology: macro-typologies and targeted typologies in action. Linguistic Typology 27:2 ► pp. 289 ff.

Gubian, Michele, Johanna Cronenberg & Jonathan Harrington

2023. Phonetic and phonological sound changes in an agent-based model. Speech Communication 147 ► pp. 93 ff.

Kendall, Tyler, Nicolai Pharao, Jane Stuart-Smith & Charlotte Vaughn

2023. Advancements of phonetics in the 21st century: Theoretical issues in sociophonetics. Journal of Phonetics 98 ► pp. 101226 ff.

Rangelov, Tihomir, Mary Walworth & Julie Barbour

2023. A multifaceted approach to understanding unexpected sound change. Diachronica 40:3 ► pp. 384 ff.

Sabev, Mitko

2023. Unstressed vowel reduction and contrast neutralisation in western and eastern Bulgarian: A current appraisal. Journal of Phonetics 99 ► pp. 101242 ff.

TURNBULL, RORY

2023. The Effect of Usage Predictability on Phonetic and Phonological Variation. In The Handbook of Usage‐Based Linguistics, ► pp. 145 ff.

Yu, Alan C.L.

2023. The Actuation Problem. Annual Review of Linguistics 9:1 ► pp. 215 ff.

DiCanio, Christian

2022. The evolution of tonally conditioned allomorphy in Triqui: evidence from spontaneous speech corpora. Linguistics Vanguard 8:s5 ► pp. 545 ff.

Fernández Cuesta, Julia

2022. Der Geist, der stets verneint: Roger Lass’s epistemology of linguistic change. Language & History 65:1 ► pp. 39 ff.

Matzinger, Theresa & Nikolaus Ritt

2022. Phonotactically probable word shapes represent attractors in the cultural evolution of sound patterns. Cognitive Linguistics 33:2 ► pp. 415 ff.

Song, Hanbyul & James White

2022. Interaction of phonological biases and frequency in learning a probabilistic language pattern. Cognition 226 ► pp. 105170 ff.

Stevens, Mary & Jonathan Harrington

2022. Individual variation and the coarticulatory path to sound change: agent-based modeling of /str/ in English and Italian. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 7:1

Munteanu, Andrei

2021. Homophony avoidance in the grammar: Russian nominal allomorphy. Phonology 38:3 ► pp. 401 ff.

Hinskens, Frans

2020. The Expanding Universe of the Study of Sound Change. In The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, ► pp. 5 ff.

O’Rourke, Erin

2020. Phonological processes in flux. In Amazonian Spanish [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 23], ► pp. 223 ff.

Szabó, Ildikó Emese

2020. A computational modelof phonotactic acquisition. Linguistic Variation 20:1 ► pp. 3 ff.

Harrington, Jonathan, Michele Gubian, Mary Stevens & Florian Schiel

2019. Phonetic change in an Antarctic winter. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 146:5 ► pp. 3327 ff.

Stevens, Mary, Jonathan Harrington & Florian Schiel

2019. Associating the origin and spread of sound change using agent-based modelling applied to /s/-retraction in English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4:1

Todd, Simon, Janet B. Pierrehumbert & Jennifer Hay

2019. Word frequency effects in sound change as a consequence of perceptual asymmetries: An exemplar-based model. Cognition 185 ► pp. 1 ff.

Blevins, Juliette

2018. Evolutionary Phonology and the life cycle of voiceless sonorants. In Typological hierarchies in synchrony and diachrony [Typological Studies in Language, 121], ► pp. 31 ff.

Blevins, Juliette

2019. Evolutionary phonology as human behavior. In Columbia School Linguistics in the 21st Century [Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics, 77], ► pp. 281 ff.

Hall, Kathleen Currie, Elizabeth Hume, T. Florian Jaeger & Andrew Wedel

2018. The role of predictability in shaping phonological patterns. Linguistics Vanguard 4:s2

Harrington, Jonathan, Felicitas Kleber, Ulrich Reubold, Florian Schiel & Mary Stevens

2018. Linking Cognitive and Social Aspects of Sound Change Using Agent‐Based Modeling. Topics in Cognitive Science 10:4 ► pp. 707 ff.

Wedel, Andrew, Noah Nelson & Rebecca Sharp

2018. The phonetic specificity of contrastive hyperarticulation in natural speech. Journal of Memory and Language 100 ► pp. 61 ff.

Yin, Sora Heng & James White

2018. Neutralization and homophony avoidance in phonological learning. Cognition 179 ► pp. 89 ff.

Cornish, Hannah, Rick Dale, Simon Kirby, Morten H. Christiansen & Robert C Berwick

2017. Sequence Memory Constraints Give Rise to Language-Like Structure through Iterated Learning. PLOS ONE 12:1 ► pp. e0168532 ff.

Grawunder, Sven

2017. The Caucasus. In The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics, ► pp. 356 ff.

Harrington, Jonathan, Felicitas Kleber, Ulrich Reubold & Mary Stevens

2016. The Relevance of Context and Experience for the Operation of Historical Sound Change. In Toward Robotic Socially Believable Behaving Systems - Volume II [Intelligent Systems Reference Library, 106], ► pp. 61 ff.

Kull, Kalevi

2016. The Biosemiotic Concept of the Species. Biosemiotics 9:1 ► pp. 61 ff.

Recasens, Daniel

2016. Stressed vowel assimilation to palatal consonants in early Romance. Journal of Historical Linguistics 6:2 ► pp. 201 ff.

Hay, Jennifer B., Janet B. Pierrehumbert, Abby J. Walker & Patrick LaShell

2015. Tracking word frequency effects through 130 years of sound change. Cognition 139 ► pp. 83 ff.

Pertsova, Katya

2015. Interaction of morphological and phonological markedness in Russian genitive plural allomorphy. Morphology 25:2 ► pp. 229 ff.

Sóskuthy, Márton

2015. Understanding change through stability: A computational study of sound change actuation. Lingua 163 ► pp. 40 ff.

Tupper, P. F.

2015. Exemplar Dynamics and Sound Merger in Language. SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics 75:4 ► pp. 1469 ff.

Morley, Rebecca L

2014. Implications of an Exemplar-Theoretic Model of Phoneme Genesis: A Velar Palatalization Case Study. Language and Speech 57:1 ► pp. 3 ff.

Michael, Lev, Stephanie Farmer, Gregory Finley, Christine Beier & Karina Sullón Acosta

2013. A Sketch of Muniche Segmental and Prosodic Phonology. International Journal of American Linguistics 79:3 ► pp. 307 ff.

Shipman, Patrick D., Sérgio H. Faria & Christopher Strickland

2013. Towards a continuous population model for natural language vowel shift. Journal of Theoretical Biology 332 ► pp. 123 ff.

Wedel, Andrew, Scott Jackson & Abby Kaplan

2013. Functional Load and the Lexicon: Evidence that Syntactic Category and Frequency Relationships in Minimal Lemma Pairs Predict the Loss of Phoneme contrasts in Language Change. Language and Speech 56:3 ► pp. 395 ff.

Wedel, Andrew, Abby Kaplan & Scott Jackson

2013. High functional load inhibits phonological contrast loss: A corpus study. Cognition 128:2 ► pp. 179 ff.

Pierrehumbert, Janet B.

2012. Burstiness of Verbs and Derived Nouns. In Shall We Play the Festschrift Game?, ► pp. 99 ff.

Hall, Daniel Currie

2011. Phonological contrast and its phonetic enhancement: dispersedness without dispersion. Phonology 28:1 ► pp. 1 ff.

Iverson, Gregory K. & Joseph C. Salmons

2011. Final Devoicing and Final Laryngeal Neutralization. In The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, ► pp. 1 ff.

KAPLAN, ABBY

2011. How much homophony is normal?. Journal of Linguistics 47:3 ► pp. 631 ff.

Kaplan, Abby

2015. notes / notizen — discussion / diskussion. Diachronica 32:2 ► pp. 268 ff.

Martin, Andrew & Sharon Peperkamp

2011. Speech Perception and Phonology. In The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, ► pp. 1 ff.

MINKOVA, DONKA

2011. Phonemically contrastive fricatives in Old English?. English Language and Linguistics 15:1 ► pp. 31 ff.

Wedel, Andrew

2011. Self‐Organization in Phonology. In The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, ► pp. 1 ff.

Wedel, Andrew

2012. Lexical contrast maintenance and the organization of sublexical contrast systems. Language and Cognition 4:4 ► pp. 319 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.