Phonological emergence and social reorganization: Developing a nasal /æ/ system in Lansing, Michigan

Phonological emergence and social reorganization: Developing a nasal /æ/ system in Lansing, Michigan

Phonological rule innovation is thought to come about via reanalysis of some phonetic variation. Yet, empirical evidence suggests instead that the role of phonetic variation during phonological rule innovation is minor. This paper adds to this ongoing debate an empirical analysis of an emergent allophonic contrast-an "/æ/ nasal system"-in White Michigan English. Analyses of speaker-level acoustic data from a sociolinguistic corpus and a subphonemic judgment task suggest that Lansing exhibits gradual phonological rule emergence. Social conditioning appears to act as the catalyst of phonological rule formation and its spread. The mechanism of actuation was thus "the chance alignment of social and phonetic variability," suggesting that social conditioning on phonetic variability must play a major role in phonological emergence.

One of the many challenges for any phonological theory is accounting for rule innovation, that is, how do members of a speech community posit a phonological rule that had never before existed in their speech community. The prevailing sentiment surrounding phonological emergence is that it develops gradually-some exaggerated difference between two phonetic variants is eventually reanalyzed (by speakers and/or hearers) as a phonological rule. Others have argued, however, that there need not be a phonetic precursor to phonological emergence-change to the grammar is sudden and does not require anything in the phonetics to prompt the change.

Though the mechanisms of community spread have been widely explored, the mechanisms that govern phonological emergence or "phonologization" remain understudied. This is likely because as Hockett surmised, phonological emergence is rare and occurs suddenly-too soon for anyone to detect this kind of event by direct observation. What we do know about phonological emergence has been deduced from the results of perception studies, simulations, synchronic analyses, and observations about historical data. As Fruehwald pointed out, underrepresented in the literature are portraits of phonological emergence using language production data while the change is in progress. The few analyses examining the development of a phonological allophonic split, the phenomenon explored in this paper, disagree as to whether emergence is gradual or abrupt.

The present investigation focuses on one case of phonological allophonic emergence-/æ/ nasal allophony in Lansing, Michigan. Whereas /æ/ in Lansing was previously raised to [sæ] in all phonological environments, younger generations exhibit a nasal allophonic system whereby /æ/ is raised only before nasal consonants. To investigate the mechanisms by which this phonological rule emerged in Lansing, I utilize a combination of analyses, examining speaker-level distributions and community-level acoustic target analyses from a natural language corpus, and the results of a judgment task. The results support a theory of gradual phonological emergence. I show that no speaker/respondent before or at the beginning of the community change distinguished prenasal from preoral /æ/. Over time, community members developed a phonetic distinction between the two allophones, which was then followed by social conditioning on these allophones, and then the appearance of some speakers who exhibit a phonological rule. These results highlight the importance of accounting for external/social conditioning during theory development. Our social conditioning findings provide support for the hypothesis put forward by Baker et al., who stated that "sound change depends on phonetically-motivated inter-speaker variation that precedes socially motivated inter-speaker variation, which permits a solution to the actuation problem."

In what follows, I describe the two main phonological emergence theories with evidence from recent studies examining the same emergence phenomenon in different locales. I then examine the empirical motivation for the current analysis, highlighting the synchronic patterns of /æ/ in North American English and the preliminary diachronic account of system change in Lansing. I then turn to the methods and results where I examine phonological emergence and community spread in Lansing. While I find support for the gradual analysis, I ponder in the discussion whether external/social conditions on the ground might help to distinguish between communities in which emergence is gradual versus abrupt.

Phonological emergence: abrupt versus gradual

Theories of gradual phonological emergence posit that change proceeds through the grammar incrementally, first occurring in the phonetics and then in the phonology. One theory of gradual change is that of The Life-Cycle of Phonological Processes, the Life-Cycle. According to the Life-Cycle, phonological processes first begin as language-independent or mechanical phonetic effects (stage one) that, through a process called phonologization (stage two), become cognitively controlled language-specific phonetic implementation effects. They then become stabilized as a phrase-level categorical/phonological rule (stage three), and by domain narrowing over time the rule applies only at the word level (stage four), and then the stem-level (stage five). In its last stage, the process advances to the lexicon through morphologization and/or lexicalization. Much of the theory of the Life-Cycle is based upon observations of synchronic variation within a language, for instance, in North American English /æ/ systems, which we will focus on in this paper, where each Life-Cycle stage can be observed in a different regional variety. For Bermúdez-Otero, the Life-Cycle could account for synchronic variability as well as diachronic change, because though various dialects of a language can undergo the same change-toward allophony, for example-they do so at different rates. Other theories of gradual phonological emergence include the "accumulation-of-errors" hypothesis, continued reanalysis at later stages, Evolutionary Phonology, and Exemplar Theory. Though the details of each theory are different, they all consider phonetic variability to be a significant catalyst to phonological emergence.

In contrast, the Big Bang Theory of Phonological Processes suggests that phonetic factors guide sound change only briefly and that phonological conditioning takes over quickly. To motivate this argument, Janda and Joseph re-examined the synchronic variation of two processes, one of which is Swiss German o-lowering. In German, o-lowering originally occurred only before R, a rule that persists in the central city of Schaffhausen, Switzerland. Lowering has generalized in different ways in surrounding villages. For example, in some locales, lowering occurs before all obstruents except B while in other locales lowering occurs only before nasals and coronal obstruents. Crucially for Janda and Joseph, these environments did not phonetically favor a lowered O, suggesting that if phonetic variation did play a role in this change, it must have been brief and overruled by the phonology instantly. There is, however, no data to support this hypothesis.

Indeed, as Fruehwald pointed out, much of our understanding of phonological emergence suffers from a paucity of empirical evidence. Our current knowledge rests on observations of synchronic variation, like the story of o-lowering in German locales, completed changes, experimental simulations, perception studies, or prior theories. Below I describe the findings from two studies examining the same emergence phenomenon-Canadian Raising-in two disparate North American communities, analyzing data observed during the change. Fruehwald observed abrupt emergence while Berkson, Davis, and Strickler demonstrated a gradual emergence process.