Kapatsinski Vsevolod
Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, United States.
Front Psychol. 2021 Aug 12;12:652664. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.652664. eCollection 2021.
This paper aims examines the role of hierarchical inference in sound change. Through hierarchical inference, a language learner can distribute credit for a pronunciation between the intended phone and the larger units in which it is embedded, such as triphones, morphemes, words and larger syntactic constructions and collocations. In this way, hierarchical inference resolves the longstanding debate about the unit of sound change: it is not necessary for change to affect only sounds, or only words. Instead, both can be assigned their proper amount of credit for a particular pronunciation of a phone. Hierarchical inference is shown to generate novel predictions for the emergence of stable variation. Under standard assumptions about linguistic generalization, it also generates a counterintuitive prediction of a U-shaped frequency effect in an advanced articulatorily-motivated sound change. Once the change has progressed far enough for the phone to become associated with the reduced pronunciation, novel words will be more reduced than existing words that, for any reason, have become associated with the unreduced variant. Avoiding this prediction requires learners to not consider novel words to be representative of the experienced lexicon. Instead, learners should generalize to novel words from other words that are likely to exhibit similar behavior: rare words, and the words that occur in similar contexts. Directions for future work are outlined.
本文旨在研究层级推理在语音变化中的作用。通过层级推理，语言学习者可以将一个发音的功劳分配到目标音素以及它所嵌入的更大单位之间，比如三元音、语素、单词以及更大的句法结构和搭配。通过这种方式，层级推理解决了关于语音变化单位的长期争论：变化不一定只影响音素，也不一定只影响单词。相反，对于一个音素的特定发音，两者都可以被赋予适当的功劳份额。研究表明，层级推理能够对稳定变异的出现产生新的预测。在关于语言泛化的标准假设下，它还会对一种由发音驱动的高级语音变化中的U形频率效应产生违反直觉的预测。一旦这种变化发展到足够程度，使得该音素与简化发音相关联，新单词的发音将比那些由于任何原因与未简化变体相关联的现有单词更加简化。要避免这种预测，学习者就不能将新单词视为经验词汇的代表。相反，学习者应该从其他可能表现出类似行为的单词中进行泛化，比如生僻词以及出现在相似语境中的单词。文章还概述了未来的研究方向。
