Lexical diffusion


Lexical diffusion is the hypothesis that a sound change is an abrupt change that spreads gradually across the words in a language to which it is applicable.
It contrasts with the Neogrammarian view that a sound change results from phonetically conditioned articulatory drift acting uniformly on all applicable words, which implies that sound changes are regular, with exceptions due to analogy and dialect borrowing.
Similar views were expressed by Romance dialectologists in the late 19th century, but were reformulated and renamed by William Wang and coworkers studying varieties of Chinese in the 1960s and 1970s.
William Labov found evidence for both processes, but argued that they operate at different levels.

Neogrammarians and dialectologists

A key assumption of historical linguistics is that sound change is regular.
This principle was summarized by the Neogrammarians in the late 19th century in the slogan "sound laws suffer no exceptions", and forms the basis of the comparative method of reconstruction and the tree model of linguistic evolution.
Inspired by the Uniformitarian Principle of geology, Neogrammarians such as Hermann Paul described regularity as a consequence of the operation of sound change as an imperceptible articulatory drift conditioned by the phonetic environment.
Leonard Bloomfield later summarized this view:
He summarized the mechanism as "phonemes change".
Despite the unequivocal form in which these slogans are often quoted, the Neogrammarians admitted two exceptions to regular sound change: analogy and dialect borrowing.
Uniform sound change was first challenged by Hugo Schuchardt, a dialectologist of Romance languages, who wrote in his criticism of the Neogrammarians:
Dialectologists studying the Romance languages found many apparent exceptions to uniformity, reflected in their slogan chaque mot a son histoire, which is commonly ascribed to Jules Gilliéron but also originated with Schuchardt.
An example is the shortening of English 'u', resulting in different vowels in the words cut and put.
When the isogloss defining this feature in England is examined closely, it emerges that individual words are moving from to over time, and individual speakers fluctuate in their pronunciation of the same words.
Some sound changes, such as metathesis or haplology, are inherently discontinuous, and therefore incompatible with gradual, imperceptible change.

Wang's reformulation

In 1962, Peking University published the Hanyu Fangyin Zihui, containing transcriptions of 2444 morphemes in 17 modern varieties of Chinese.
The DOC project at the University of California, Berkeley, headed by William Wang, attempted to apply the comparative method to a computerized form of this data.
However, the Chinese data revealed pervasive irregularities.
For example, Middle Chinese words in the third tone class with voiced initials have two reflexes in the modern Teochew dialect, but no phonetic factor has been found to condition the split.
Cheng and Wang list 12 pairs of words that where homophonous in Middle Chinese but have different modern pronunciations.
Similar examples were found on other Chinese varieties and other language families.
Wang accounted for such irregularities by positing a form of lexical diffusion:
In this view, a sound change would be regular if the change had completed its progress through the lexicon, but irregularity would be seen if the change were still incomplete, or if it were interrupted by another change.
Other linguists responded that the explanation of the irregularities should be sought in dialect mixture.
Indeed Wang and Lien discovered that the Teochew phenomenon was the result of borrowing from the local literary reading tradition.
They present a revised model distinguishing between the initial "actuation" of a sound change by language contact or internal factors, and its "implementation" by lexical diffusion.

Evaluation

Labov found evidence for both processes, but argued that they operate at different levels:
Paul Kiparsky argues that under a proper definition of analogy as optimization, lexical diffusion is a non-proportional type of analogy similar to leveling, rather than a type of sound change.