Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-c52kr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-09T14:10:51.376Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Resolving the Neogrammarian Controversy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

William Labov
William Labov*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Recent investigations of the history of Chinese have given new support to the view that sound change diffuses gradually across the lexicon. Yet instrumental studies of sound change in progress support the Neogrammarian position that change affects all words that include the sound according to their phonetic environment. The paradox can be resolved by distinguishing abstract phonological change from change in low-level output rules. Both types of rules can be observed in recent studies of sound change in progress in Philadelphia: the lexical split of short a shows lexical diffusion in progress, while raising, lowering, fronting, and backing rules show Neogrammarian regularity. A review of the literature on completed changes and other changes in progress tends to support the relevance of a hierarchy of abstractness in determining the nature of the transition from one stage to the other.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 57 , Issue 2 , June 1981 , pp. 267 - 308
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 by Linguistic Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

*

This paper represents the presidential address given at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Los Angeles, December 28, 1979.

References

Babbitt, E. H. 1896. The English of the lower classes in New York City and vicinity. Dialect Notes 1. 457–64.Google Scholar
Bickerton, Derek. 1974. Creolization, linguistic universals, natural semantax and the brain. Working Papers in Linguistics, University of Hawaii, 6. 1124–41.Google Scholar
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Holt.Google Scholar
Bonebrake, Veronica. 1979. Historical labial-velar changes in Germanic. (Umeå studies in the humanities, 29.) Umeå: Acta Universitatis Umensis.Google Scholar
Brink, Lars. 1977. On sound laws. Paper given at the Society for Nordic Philology, Copenhagen.Google Scholar
Brink, Lars, and Lund, Joern. 1975. Dansk rigmal. 2 vols. Copenhagen: Gyldendal.Google Scholar
Bruneau, Charles. 1937. La diphtongaison des voyelles françaises. Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 57. 170–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burrow, Thomas, and Emeneau, Murray B. 1961. Dravidian etymological dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Cedergren, Henrietta. 1973. The interplay of social and linguistic factors in Panama. Cornell dissertation.Google Scholar
Chen, Matthew, and Wang, William S-Y. 1975. Sound change: Actuation and implementation. Lg. 51.255–81.Google Scholar
Cheng, Chin-Chuan, and Wang, William S-Y. 1977. Tone change in Chao-Zhou Chinese: A study in lexical diffusion. In Wang, (ed.) 1977:86–100.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam, and Halle, Morris. 1968. The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Cohen, Paul. 1970. The tensing and raising of short a in the metropolitan area of New York City. Columbia University master's essay.Google Scholar
Delbrück, Berthold. 1885. Die neueste Sprachforschung: Betrachtungen ueber George Curtius' Schrift ‘Zur Kritik der neuesten Sprachforschung’. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.Google Scholar
Dressler, Wolfgang. 1979. Diachronic phonology. Paper given at the MLA Symposium on Directions in Historical Linguistics, San Francisco.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Charles. 1975. ‘Short a‘ in Philadelphia English. Studies in linguistics in honor of George L. Trager, ed. by Smith, M. Estellie, 259–74. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Iván, Fónagy. 1956. Ueber den Verlauf des Lautwandels. Acta Linguistica (Budapest) 6. 173–278.Google Scholar
Iván, Fónagy. 1967. Variation und Lautwandel. Monologentagung. Wien.Google Scholar
Gauchat, Louis. 1905. L'unité phonétique dans le patois d'une commune. Festschrift Heinreich Morf, 175–232. Halle: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Goidanich, P. 1926. Saggio critico sullo studio de L. Gauchat. Archivio Glottologico Italiano 20. 60–71.Google Scholar
Guy, Gregory. 1980. Variation in the group and the individual: The case of final stop deletion. In Labov, 1980:1–36.Google Scholar
Hermann, Edouard. 1929. Lautveraenderungen in der Individualsprache einer Mundart. Nachrichten der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Goettingen, Phil.-hist. Kl., 11. 195–214.Google Scholar
Hindle, Donald. 1980. The social and situational conditioning of phonetic variation. University of Pennsylvania dissertation.Google Scholar
Hockett, Charles F. 1958. A course in modern linguistics. New York: Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hockett, Charles F. 1965. Sound change. Lg. 41.185–204.Google Scholar
Hoenigswald, Henry M. 1978. The Annus Mirabilis 1876 and posterity. Transactions of the Philological Society, 17–35.Google Scholar
Jankowsky, Kurt. 1972. The neogrammarians. The Hague: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Janson, Tore. 1977. Reversed lexical diffusion and lexical split: Loss of -d in Stockholm. In Wang (ed.) 1977, 252–65.Google Scholar
Jespersen, Otto. 1924. The philosophy of grammar. London: Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Jespersen, Otto. 1949. A modern English grammar on historical principles, vol. 1. London: George Allen.Google Scholar
King, Robert. 1969. Historical linguistics and generative grammar. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar
Kinkade, Dale. 1972. The alveopalatal shift in Cowlitz Salitz. IJAL 39. 224–31.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul. 1971. Historical linguistics. A survey of linguistic science, ed. by Dingwall, W., 577–649. College Park: University of Maryland.Google Scholar
Krishnamurti, Bh. 1978. Areal and lexical diffusion of sound change. Lg. 54.1–20.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Sherman, and Quirk, Randolph. 1953. Some recent interpretations of Old English digraph spellings. Lg. 29.143–53.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1966. The social stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1978. The measurement of vowel shifts. Paper given at the American Association of Phonetic Sciences, Winter meeting, San Francisco.Google Scholar
Labov, William 1980. (ed.) Locating language in time and space. (Quantitative analyses of linguistic structures, 1.) New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Labov, William, and Wald, Benji. 1969. General principles of vowel shifting. Paper given at the Annual Meeting of the LSA, San Francisco.Google Scholar
Wald, Benji, Yaeger, Malcah: and Steiner, Richard. 1972. A quantitative study of sound change in progress. Philadelphia: US Regional Survey.Google Scholar
Steiner, Richard, et al. 1980. Social determinants of sound change. (Final report on NSF SOC-75–00245.) Philadelphia: US Regional Survey.Google Scholar
Lehmann, Winfred P. 1967. (ed.) A reader in nineteenth-century historical Indo-European linguistics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Naro, Anthony, and Lemle, Miriam. 1976. Syntactic diffusion. Papers from the Parasession on Diachronic Syntax, 221–39. Chicago: CLS.Google Scholar
Liberman, Alvin, et al. 1957. The discrimination of speech sounds within and across phonemic boundaries. J. of Exp. Psych. 54.358–68.Google Scholar
Ma, Roxana, and Herasimchuk, Eleanor. 1968. The linguistic dimensions of a bilingual neighborhood. Bilingualism in the barrio, ed. by Fishman, Joshua et al., 636–835. Washington, DC: Office of Education.Google Scholar
Malkiel, Yakov. 1967. Every word has its own history. Glossa 1. 137–49.Google Scholar
Malkiel, Yakov. 1976. Multi-conditioned sound change in the impact of morphology on phonology. Lg. 52.757–79.Google Scholar
Martinet, André. 1955. Économie des changements phonétiques. Berne: Francke.Google Scholar
Milroy, James, and Milroy, Leslie. 1978. Belfast: Change and variation in an urban vernacular. Sociolinguistic patterns in British English, ed. by Trudgill, Peter, 37–51. Baltimore: University Park Press.Google Scholar
Naro, Anthony, and Lemle, M. 1976. Syntactic diffusion. Papers from the Session on Diachronic Syntax, 221–39. Chicago: CLS.Google Scholar
Osthoff, Hermann, and Brugmann, Karl. 1878. Morphologische Untersuchungen auf den Gebiete der indogermanischen Sprachen, I. Leipzig. [Translated in Lehmann 1967.]Google Scholar
Payne, Arvilla. 1976. The acquisition of the phonological system of a second dialect. University of Pennsylvania dissertation.Google Scholar
Payne, Arvilla. 1980. Factors controlling the acquisition of the Philadelphia dialect by out-of-state children. To appear in Labov (ed.) 1980.Google Scholar
Pedersen, Holger. 1962. The discovery of language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Pisoni, David. 1971. On the nature of categorical perception of speech sounds. (Status report on speech research, SR-27.) New Haven: Haskins Laboratories.Google Scholar
Postal, Paul. 1968. Aspects of phonological theory. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Remacle, Louis. 1944. Les variations de 1‘ h secondaire en Ardenne liègois: Le problème de l’ h en liègeois. Paris: Éditions Dion.Google Scholar
Schuchardt, Hugo. 1980. The ethnography of variation. Selected writings on pidgins and creoles. Translated by Thomas Markey. Ann Arbor: Karoma.Google Scholar
Sherman, Donald. 1973. Noun–verb stress alternation: An example of the lexical diffusion of sound change in English. POLA Reports, 2nd series, 17:46–82. Berkeley.Google Scholar
Sledd, James H. 1966. Breaking, umlaut, and the Southern drawl. Lg. 42.18–41.Google Scholar
Sommerfelt, Alf. 1930. Sur la propagation de changements phonétiques. Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap 4. 76–128.Google Scholar
Stockwell, Robert, and Barritt, C. Westbrook. 1951. Some Old English graphemic–phonemic correspondences—æ, ea, and a. (Studies in Linguistics, Occasional papers, 4.) Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Streeter, Mary. 1977. DOC, 1971: A Chinese dialect dictionary on computer. In Wang, (ed.) 1977:101–19.Google Scholar
Toon, Thomas. 1976. Lexical diffusion in Old English. Papers from the Parasession on the Lexicon, 357–64. Chicago: CLS.Google Scholar
Trager, George L. 1930. The pronunciation of ‘short a’ in American Standard English. American Speech 5. 396–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trager, George L. 1934. What conditions limit variants of a phoneme? American Speech 9. 313–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trager, George L. 1940. One phonemic entity becomes two: The case of ‘short a’. American Speech 15. 255–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wang, William S-Y. 1969. Competing sound changes as a cause of residue. Lg. 45.9–25.Google Scholar
Wang, William S-Y. 1977. (ed.) The lexicon in phonological change. The Hague: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wang, William S-Y. 1979. Language change—a lexical perspective. Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 8:353–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wang, William S-Y., and Cheng, Chin-Chuang. 1977. Implementation of phonological change: The Shuang-Feng Chinese case. In Wang, (ed.) 1977:148–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weinreich, Uriel, Labov, William; and Herzog, Marvin. 1968. Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. Directions for historical linguistics, ed. by Lehmann, Winfred P. & Malkiel, Yakov, 97–195. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Whinnom, Keith. 1965. The origin of the European-based creoles and pidgins. Orbis 14:509–27.Google Scholar
Wilbur, Terence (ed.) 1977. The Lautgesetz controversy: A documentation (1885–1886). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Winteler, J. 1876. Die Kerenzer Mundart. Leipzig.Google Scholar
Wolf, Clara, and Jiménez, E. 1977. A sound change in progress in Buenos Aires. Unpublished paper.Google Scholar
Wyld, Henry Cecil. 1936. A history of modern colloquial English. 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Yaeger, Malcah. 1975. Speaking style: Some phonetic realizations and their significance. (Pennsylvania working papers on linguistic change and variation, 1:1.) Philadelphia: U.S. Regional Survey.Google Scholar