🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1ikohsINN7rd@pith.uoregon.edu>, delancey@darkwing (Scott C DeLancey) writes:
>In article <1993Jan8.002127.20670@leland.Stanford.EDU> alderson@cisco.com (Rich Alderson) writes:

>>But they don't.  Exactly why they do change is an area of research.  Clearly,
>>the primary mechanism of change is the transmission problem:  Children
>>learning a language from their elders--not simply audlts but anyone more
>>advanced in the language than they--do not learn to reproduce perfectly the
>>learning of others.
>
>How "clear" is this, really?  It's an old idea (there's a discussion of it in
>Jespersen's _Philosophy of Grammar_ which is more intelligent than most
>current references to it) but when has it ever been demonstrated as an actual
>mechanism of language change?  We know of two *demonstrated* sources of
>change--non-native speakers and sociolinguistically motivated innovations of
>the kind studied by Labov.  The first involve adults, the second generally
>adolescents.  For "imperfect learning" to be a factor it would have to be a
>normal thing for child language habits to be carried on into adulthood--what
>evidence is there for this?

Although I usually describe myself as an Indo-Europeanist, emphasizing my
interest (& training) in historical and comparative studies, just as other
historical linguists do, I also have a background in synchronic linguistics.

In particular, I work as much as possible in the framework of natural phonology
as defined by Stampe.  In this framework, acquisition of language is viewed as
a series of suppressions of processes and additions of rules by language
learners, who need not be infants.

Sociolinguistic forces at work among adolescents are a source of change, but
each individual maintains a different idiolect, with idiosyncratic phonology.
New rules added by (near) adult speakers may lead to restructuring of the set
of suppressions among younger learners, so that the transmission of language
itself contributes to change.

It is not so much a matter of "child language habits" as of the nature of the
language mechanism in the human mind, under this view.

The mechanisms of morphological and syntactic change are much better under-
stood:  Given changes in phonology, adjustments at these levels may have to be
made, and again the transmission problem intervenes.

It was the utility of the process view of phonology for historical work that
convinced me of the utility of the process view of phonology.  I'm afraid that
I have always viewed synchronic studies that way.
-- 
Rich Alderson   'I wish life was not so short,' he thought.  'Languages take
                such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
                                                        --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@leland.stanford.edu                              _The Lost Road_