Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-7pwfn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-15T00:58:41.422Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Synchronic and Diachronic Universals in Phonology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Joseph H. Greenberg
Joseph H. Greenberg*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Get accessRights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In spite of the influential Saussurean dichotomy of synchronic and dia-chronic studies, it has in fact not been possible to keep these two main aspects of linguistics in hermetically sealed compartments. The aim of this paper is to explore the theoretical relations between phenomena in the two fields in the context of the current interest in universals. The examples cited are not intended to be conclusive and are meant only as illustrations.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 42 , Issue 2: April-June , June 1966, pp. 508 - 517
Copyright
Copyright © 1966 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

References

1 For internal reconstruction, see W. L. Chafe, ‘Internal reconstruction in Seneca’, Lg. 35.477–95 (1959) ; J. W. Marchand, ‘Internal reconstruction of phonemic split’, Lg. 32.245–53 (1956); and the references to the earlier literature in these articles.

2 See particularly R. Jakobson, ‘Typological studies and their contribution to historical comparative linguistics’, reprinted in Roman Jakobson: Selected writings I: Phonological studies 523–32 (The Hague, 1962).

3 A. Martinet, Économie des changements phonétiques: Traité de phonologie diachronique (Bern, 1955). Note that though the causes of particular phonological tendencies, which figure importantly in Martinet's exposition, are not discussed in this paper, I consider them an entirely legitimate area of inquiry.

4 C. A. Ferguson, ‘Assumptions about nasals: A sample study in phonological universals’, in Universals of language 42–7 (ed. J. H. Greenberg; Cambridge, 1963).

5 It should be noted that statements regarding the origin of nasal vowels made here are subject to the reserve expressed in Ferguson's paper regarding the possible origin of a nasal vowel in Iroquoian languages by spontaneous nasalization of an oral vowel.

6 Of course, where an unrestricted universal holds, any statement may figure as implicans. For example, if a language has a case system, it has oral vowels. Such implications as the present one might, however, be said to ‘make sense’ because of the phonetic similarity of oral and nasal vowels. But of course similarity is a vague concept. It seems more satisfactory to state as a further connection between synchronic and diachronic studies that there is a sufficient reason to make an implicational statement in which the implicandum is an unrestricted universal if there is an attested case of diachronic change connecting the states described in the implicans and the implicandum.

7 J. H. Greenberg, C. E. Osgood, and J. J. Jenkins, ‘Memorandum concerning language universals,‘ in J. H. Greenberg, ed., op.cit. 255–64, especially 261–2.

8 The figures for French are taken from A. Valdman, ‘Les bases statistiques de l'antériorité articulatoire du français’, Le français moderne 27.102–10 (1959), based on a sample of 12,144 vowels. Those from Latin derive from a personal count of the first 1,000 vowels from Cicero's Letters to Atticus, Book III, Letters 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9.

9 This is true for several pairs in French as reported in A. Valdman.

10 G. Bonfante, ‘Reconstruction and linguistic method, part I’, Word 1.83–94 (1945), 91

11 B. Bloch, ‘Studies in Colloquial Japanese IV. Phonemics’, Lg. 26.86–125 (1950).