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Informativity and the Actuation of Lenition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Uriel Cohen Priva
Uriel Cohen Priva*
Affiliation:
Brown University
*
Brown University, Box #1821, Providence, RI 02906, [Uriel_cohen_priva@brown.edu]
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Abstract

What causes Indonesian to lenite word-final /k/, American English to lenite word-final /t/, and Spanish to lenite word-final /s/? This article shows that all three observed lenition patterns can be motivated using a single principle: languages preferentially lenite segments that provide relatively low informativity compared to the amount of informativity those segments carry in other languages. In a comparison of a diverse sample of seven languages from the LDC CALLHOME and CALLFRIEND corpora, Indonesian /k/, American English /t/, and Spanish /s/ are found to have the lowest informativity, predicting that they would be more likely to be affected by sound change processes. In a subsequent regression-based corpus study, low informativity predicted the propensity of word-final lenition of all obstruents in American English after phonetic and phonological factors were controlled for. This article therefore provides a partial solution to the famous actuation problem (Weinreich et al. 1968) with respect to the actuation of lenition processes.

Keywords

lenitioninformationinformativityactuation problemsound change

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 93 , Issue 3 , September 2017, pp. 569 - 597
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 Linguistic Society of America

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