This paper is prepared while I am a Guggenheim fellow

As always, it is both an honor and a pleasure to speak at the forum of the Linguistic In-

stitute. In the present case, my pleasure is veiy much enhanced by the theme of this

particular Institute, which is "Language Form and Language Function: A Western and

Nonwestern Perspective."

It is all too tempting for us to draw conclusions about what human language is like

based on the samples of language we most commonly encounter here in the West.

Let me give just one example of this western bias, one with immediate importance.

Under the impact of Western languages, it is often assumed that alphabetic or-

thographies, constructed on phonetic segments, are the optimal system for repre-

senting language. This assumption is mostly made tacitly, to be sure, and thus it may

be all the more misleading. On the other hand, orthographies based on other units,

found outside the West, such as syllabaries or logographs, are felt in some way to be

underdeveloped or retarded, and doomed to fall in time to the ultimate and inevitable tri-

umph of the alphabet.

But clearly this is an issue that is much too important to be assumed a priori on the

skewed sample of just the Western languages. It is encouraging to note, though, that

serious work is beginning to be done on the question of optimal orthography, based on

considerations of language structure and psychological experiments on reading.1

Hopefully, an increasing amount of involvement will be forthcoming from linguists in

such research.

So the moment is long due that we extend our focus beyond the familiar scene of

Western languages in a serious way. In this respect, it is reassuring to look through the

catalog of this Linguistic Institute, with its rich array of courses on the languages and lin-

guistics of Africa and Asia. The planners of this Institute deserve our warm thanks for

their effort in highlighting a more balanced perspective on the study of human language.

The topic I was assigned to discuss this evening is 'Language Change'. Change in-

volves the differences between two or more states in time. Presumably the goal here

would be to reveal the principles according to which these differences are implemented,

and to discover the mechanisms which brought about these differences. I hope to

make some observations on both of these issues of implementation and actuation. But

first it is necessary to distinguish change along several time scales, for it seems that the~

This paper is prepared while I am a Guggenheim fellow visiting Osmania University in India. Thanks aredue both to the Guggenheim Foundation and Bh. Krishnamurti of Osmania University for their support andencouragement. I would also like to acknowledge the many years of camaraderie and collaboration of C.C. Cheng, which were critical ingredients in the progression from idea to data to knowledge on language

change.

4 The Three Scales of Diachrony 61

questions. the data, and the methods would not be the same for all these scales.

Microhistory

4.1

For convenience of exposition, I will refer to the three time scales as microhistory,

mesohistory, and macrohistory. They 'all deal with change across time and therefore

are all aspects of the diachronic study of language. The microhistory of language is

reckoned across a very thin slice of time, in years or decades. It is concerned with what

William Labov (1972) calls 'change in progress', which offers a diachronic way of look-

ing at synchronic variation.

In the microhistory of language the interests of several research areas converge.

The sociolinguist focuses his attention on groups of people, as -these are divided by

age, by sex, by region, and by social background. Typically, within so short a period we

find the model and the copies, the unchanged and the changed, existing side by side in

an orderly profusion, vying for survival.2 By correlating the social parameters with the

noted language differences, we may hope to make some short-term predictions on

which of the various usages of today will continue into the language of tomorrow (Wein-

reich et al. 1968).

Closely related to these questions is the study of language contact. With the rapid

increase in population and mobility, the notion of a pure and homogeneous speech

community, whatever credibility it may have once held, cannot realistically be main-

tained. Diversity is the fundamental ingredient of change, as is well recognized for

biological systems; this dogma is no less true for linguistic systems at every level. The

further heterogeneity that contact produces adds yet new dimensions to the challenges

of the student of language change.

Among these various groups of people there is a very special class, with a unique

biological and social status -and these are the very young. How children learn lan-

guage -the transmission across generations -is clearly one of the vital questions in

the whole of language change. Unlike that of the other groups, the language children

use changes not only as a function of differences in environment, but also as a function

of an increasing biological capacity due to neural and motor-sensory maturation. On-

togeny hardly ever recapitulates phylogeny with fidelity. Nevertheless, some insights

can be gained here that may prove useful toward understanding the processes of lan-

guage evolution.

Until recently, theorizing on language acquisition, especially within the framework of

generative grammar, has been often cast in rather global terms -in terms of whole

categories of sounds and the addition and reorganization of rules. However, more fine-

grained work done in this area, by Ferguson and Farwell (1975), and Hsieh (1972), and

others, clearly show that the real situation is much more complex, both within the case

histories of each individual child, and in the strategies and development across different

62 LANGUAGE CHANGE

children.

Some children, for instance, are extraordinarily pliable and are eager to experiment

with new sounds and new sequences. Others are more conservative in their phonologi-

cal behavior, and produce only forms that they have a good chance of getting right;

they seem to prefer learning and using those words in which they have phonetic con-

fidence, while avoiding others. Linguistic perso'nalities, it would seem, are manifested at

quite an early age, and these differences in strategy may very well have lasting influen-

ces on their adult language behavior. There is reason to expect that some of the in-

dividual differences in the language of adults can be traced back to the early years. It is

an important finding that these differences can be detected even during the learning of

the first several consonants, as is shown in some recent work of Ferguson for the ac-

quisition of English laterals, reported in Fillmore, Kempler, and Wang (1979).

From such fine-grained research, it emerges clearly that there is a primacy of lexical,learning during phonological development. Even a relatively small scale sampling of the

sort done by Ferguson and Farwell shows that the child does not progress by learning

units like phonemes or allophones, but rather by gradually adding lexical items to his

repertoire. The same sound in similar contexts may undergo altogether different his-

tories, as this sound appears in different words, This is clearly demonstrated in Table 1.

These data in the table are extracted from the study of Ferguson and Farwell, who fol-

lowed with great care the development of three children who were learning their first fifty

words. The data are of one child's progression in the acquisition of initial b -across a

span of some four weeks. They show how different words exhibit different patterns of

variation according to different schedules, The unity of the phoneme only emerges at

the end of the acquisition process when mastery is complete.

Table 1. A child's acquisition of some b-initial words in four weeks (based on Ferguson and Farwell 1975)

SessionVII

SessionVIII

SessionIX

SessionVI

bb'

b13

bbbbb

babybookbye-byeballblanketbouncebangbox

brv

brv

brv

bbb

b'bQ'

bbbbb b

13

0

ph

'w~

'13

J ph


The basic unit of acquisition, then, is something like the word. The awareness, con-

scious, or subconscious, of phonetic identity or similarity between portions of words, is

something that comes. to different children in completely idiosyncratic ways, and

probably cannot be attributed to any single uniform stage of development. This theme

of lexical primacy is central to my remarks there, and I will return to it later.

4.2 Mesohistory

As opposed to microhistory, the great bulk of the literature of language change actually

deals with the middle time scale. Historical linguistics has traditionally concerned itself

with changes that occur across centuries or millenia. Since it reaches further back in

time, the primary data for language history are much more uneven and uncertain. Writ-

ten records of early languages are low in both quality and quantity, and only in a handful

of cases do they extend for more than 2 or 3 thousand years. The methods of

reconstruction have their intrinsic limitations. Most of us would probably agree with

Kiparsky (1976) when he set the outer limits at 10 to 20 thousand years Ilover which we

can hope to reconstruct anything at all about Proto-language."

A classic question in language mesohistory, dating back to at least the neogram-

marians, has been the manner or means by which a change is implemented. This ques-

tion has caught the attention of a wide gamut of scholars through the decades, from

Henry Sweet to Alf Sommarfelt and Sapir, to Hoenigswald and Halle.

The received doctrine on this question has long been one which may be charac-

terized as phonetically gradual and lexically abrupt. The idea is, that once a phoneme

changes, it changes in all the relevant words according to the same schedule. By the

claim of lexical abruptness, the regularity of the change, the so-called neogrammarian

hypothesis, would follow as a consequence by definition. But since a change may in-

volve hundreds of words, and since languages do not seem to effect such wholesale

changes in pronunciation overnight, the phonetic gradualness becomes a necessary

corollary of lexical abruptness.

So the notion of lexical abruptness is motivated by believing that changes are al-

ways regular, and the notion of phonetic gradualness is necessitated by believing in lexi-

cal abruptness. And it is essentially this doctrine of historical change, with minor varia-

tions, that has retained the most widespread acceptance in the work in generative

phonology as well as the structuralist phonology that preceded it.

But here again, as was the case in the mlcrohistory of language, things are not that

simple. Empirical investigations over the past decade or so on a variety of languages,

using large quantities of data, have shown that there are changes which are imple-

mented in a manner that is lexically gradual. That is, a change may initiate on a handful

of words in the lexicon, where these words do not constitute any natural phonological or

morphosyntactic class. Then the change affects an increasing sector of the lexicon in

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time, perhaps eventually completing its course on all relevant words. Whether or not a

particular change ever completes its course depends on a whole host of factors, some

of which are outside the linguistic system. Vve can get at least a rough idea of the de-

gree of regularity that sound changes exhibit from a study that C. C. Cheng and I

(Cheng and Wang 1971) did on the development of initial consonants in Chinese over

the past 1400 years, shown in Table 2.

Time and again, scholars of sound change have observed that exceptions to cor-

respondences are embarrassingly numerous, frequently the irregular reflexes outnum-

bering the regular ones. Table 2 gives a rough quantitative index for these observa-

tions. Each cell in the table refers to the development of one Middle Chinese initial

consonant (ca. 600 A.D.) into one of the contemporary dialects. When the development

is indeed perfectly regular, the cell is marked with an 'x'; otherwise it is left blank. Each

blank cell in Table 2, then, is one of the 'embarrassingly numerous' cases where

regularity was not reached -and there are indeed many of them.

A particular change, for various reasons, may even reverse its course. Tore Janson

(1977) has studied such a ca~e in the deletion of final -d in the Swedish of Stockholm,

where he attributes the reversal to the influence of orthography. At any rate, this picture

of implementation which involves a gradual change across the lexicon, which mayor

may not result in complete regularity, has been called lexical diffusion (Wang 1969).

Since lexical diffusion is a process via which a change is implemented, it is in prin-

ciple accessible to any change, however the change is actuated, i.e. whether the aptua-

tion is external or internal to the system under change, or whether it is phonetically or

analogically triggered, etc.

An interesting case of lexical diffusion has been reported by Lyovin (1977), where

the actuation is due to the avoidance of homophony within the inflectional paradigm of

Tibetan verbs. The study is of particular theoretical significance because of the intricate

relations between a change that reduced initial consonant clusters, which causes

homophony, and the hierarchy of verb categories which controls the schedule accord-

ing to which periphrastic expressions are created to avoid the homophony. The present

tense dominates the past tense, for instance, so when the two forms become

homophonous due to cluster reduction, it is the past tense form that gets' displaced

from the inflectional paradigm. Similarly, the past tense form dominates the future tense

form, and it is the latter that gets displaced when homophony occurs. In each case, the

meaning of the displaced form has to be expressed periphrastically.

Lyovin's examination of the data across the various categories of verbs in Classical

Tibetan led him to observe that "homophony-inducing sound change will be blocked

from applying to certain lexical items or classes of lexical items until compensatory

developments permit the further diffusion of the shifts in question (p. 129)."

Another study in lexical diffusion that raises important theoretical issues is the inves-

tigation of O. Robinson (1977) on Swiss German vowels. Two historical changes are

66 LANGUAGE CHANGE

relevant, as shown in the diagram.

umlaut~re a

t umlaut j~ ~~-- ~

rounding

Robinson notes that the "rounding rule was diachronically much later than umlaut."

Both rules continue to operate synchronically in morphophonemic alternations.

Now if the rules applied synchronically in the order in which they entered the lan-

guage diachronically, then the la/'s which are subject to the umlaut rule should change

to lre/'s, and thus escape the rounding rule. But in almost all of the northern dialects,

these la/'s actually umlaut to 151's, presumably via I:J/. Furthermore, a synchronic rule

that rounds lrel into 151 would not be possible; it would be contradicted by other data.

For this interesting phenomenon, Robinson adopts Kiparsky's interpretation, that the

synchronic rules have reversed their diachronic order, that is, from umlaut -rounding

to rounding -umlaut.

The data of relevance here have to do with certain northern dialects, e.g. Kesswil,

where many forms exhibit the morphophonemic alternation la rv rei, when the reordering

hypothesis would expect la rv 51. Robinson's explanation of these re-alternations is that

rule reordering, though an abstract change, is diffusing across the lexicon, much as

concrete changes like d-deletion or vowel shift. These re-alternations, then, are forms

which the reordering has not reached as yet. The theoretical significance of this ex-

planation is the extension of the process of lexical diffusion to operate at a relatively

abstract level of sound change. To support his explanation, Robinson gives some ex-

emplary arguments against some alternative solutions, including the possibility of bor-

rowing these re-alternations from other dialects.

Work on lexical diffusion over the past decade has shown that the traditional view of

sound change has been excessively restrictive, and that the implementation may very

well proceed along other paths than one which is lexically abrupt. This work has been

surveyed in Chen and Wang (1975) and Wang (1976, 1979), and partly anthologized in

Wang (1977). At this stage, there is less need to document additional cases of lexical

diffusion. Rather, our next challenge, it seems to me, is to solve the puzzle of what kind

of sound change would travel along which path for its ilT.plementation. In addition to the

lexical and phonetic parameters, there is the additional statistical parameter'that must

also be considered in investigating the many paths of sound change.

Two other directions of current research in this area should also be mentioned, in

view of the very promising results obtained so far. One is the demonstration of the

relationship of the relative frequency of words to their schedules of change, as dis-

4 The Three Scales of Diachronv 67

cussed by Hooper (1977) for English, and Gerritsen and Jansen (1978) for Dutch. Al-

though such a relationship has been hypothesized at least since a century ago, it is only

recently that it can be objectively tested as a result of the availability of frequency dic-

tionaries. It is of special ,importance that Hooper has been able to show that high fre-

quency words in English are leaders in a phonetic change like schwa-deletion, but are

laggers in an analogic change like the weakening of strong verbs. If we can continue to

identify independent variables for the chronological profiles of change (relative frequen-

cy being one such variable), then perhaps the goal of being able to make short term

predictions in sound change will be eventually attainable, after all.

The other direction that I'll briefly allude to has to do with subgrouping languages.

Since it has been assumed in the bulk of historical work that sound changes are aillexi-

cally abrupt, it follows that for any change in question, a particufar group of languages

either shares the change or not -a binary yardstick. But once we recognize that dif-

fusion processes may be at work, then some changes at least can be exploited for

much more information. Indeed, as Hsieh pointed out in his seminal article (1973), this

was the insight underlying Swadesh's method of lexicostatistics. Instead of a binary

yardst[ck, quantitative measures can be made on various subgroupings of the,lan-

guages on the basis of both changed and unchanged cognates. Hsieh demonstrated

the effectiveness of this approach on the Wu dialects of eastern China by using a single

tone change.

More recently, Bh. Krishnamurti (1978) and Krishnamurti and his colleagues, in

some yet unpublished work, have made important progress in developing a suitable

methodology for the subgrouping problem. Using the Dravidian Etymological Dictionary

as the starting point, they have analyzed a large amount of computerized data to deter-

mine the genetic relationships among various languages of South India. There is every

indication that their procedures will prove fruitful when validated against linguistic situa-

tions where the answers are known, at which point they can be used in situations where

no answers are available (for unwritten languages, for example).

4.3 Macrohistory

In considering language change within the largest time perspective, its macrohistory, we

are faced with the greatest challenges -since the relevant primary data are mostly not

available. Furthermore, the necessary backgrounds and methods are frequently out-

side of the typical domain of linguistics. So we need to look into neighboring disciplines

that work on related questions, such as anthropology, biology, ethology, psychology,

zoology, and so on. An example of the interdisciplinary convergence of interest in this

area is the very successful conference in the origin and evolution of language and

speech, sponsored by the N.Y. Academy of Sciences in 1975 (Harnad et al. 1976). See

the excellent discussion of this conference by Hill and Most (1978).

68 LANGUAGE CHANGE-

A useful assumption to make here, one which most investigators accept, is that lan-

guage did not abruptly burst into the course of human evolution fully in the state of in-

tricacy and complexity that we find it today. To believe the so-called discontinuity

theory, that there was some sudden wholesale genetic mutation that in a fell swoop

transformed muteness into eloquence is to relegate macrolinguistic research to the

mystical regions of miracles and spontaneous creations.3

Rather, there must have been a very long course of emergence, much longer than

the span of time over which current methods of historical linguistics can take us. During

this emergent state, protolanguage probably at different times shared various develop-

ments, by either homology or analogy, with the communication systems of other

species. So it is likely that sorting out the ingredients of these other systems will con-

tribute to our understanding of how the ingredients of human language were accumu-

lated piece by piece over the hundreds of millennia.

One category of ingredients that has been present since the early stages of emer-

gence is the use of gestures. Although gestures are used across a wide range of

species, we share many specific ones with other primates, including several facial ex-

pressions, presumably because of the shared anatomy. Gestures accompany speech

in all languages, time-locked to various extents; they also playa relatively more

prominent role in the early communications of very young children. Phylogenetically,

Gordon Hewes (1973), among others, has championed the view that human language

originated in gestures.

Another category of ingredients that is also widespread in communication systems

is the use of prosodic features -fundamental frequency, duration, and intensity. These

features are probably exploited more fully in bird song than anywhere else, though

recent investigations on primate calls are revealing a variety of new ingredients, such as

amplitude modulation, frequency modulation, and the use of formants. In human evolu-

tion, there was a correlated development of the increased use of the hands for fighting

and carrying with the increased use of the mouth for communicating. There are certain

obvious advantages that prosodic features have over gestures: Communication can

take place over larger territories requiring no visual contact (such as in darkness or

across foliage), while the rest of the body can be engaged in other simultaneous ac-

tivities (such as running or fighting). So it is reasonable to expect that the prosodic

communication gradually expanded in importance relative to the gestures.

As the civilization of early man became increasingly complex, however, he needed

larger sets of signals with which to communicate the expanding vocabulary of mes-

sages. Since communication facilitates the planning and execution of group activities,

for purposes such as hunting for food or defense against predators or other tribes, we

can easily see how groups that have developed better language would have better

chances of survival. Everything else being equal, better language enables the formation

of larger (and hence stronger) groups, the transmission of more precise and varied in-


formation across both space and time, and the perpetuation of the gene pool of the

group of users of that language. Biologically speaking, then, selectional pressures

favored those populations with better tools for communication in probabi.y much the

same way that they favored better tools for digging or fighting.4

As the message set grew, the three prosodic parameters became insufficient as

carriers for the signals. A phonology that was largely prosodic (and laryngeal) eventual-

ly changed into a segmental one, making use of the richer possibilities of the

supralaryngeal gestures. Whereas other primates share with us the use of gestures and

prosody, it is the transition from prosody to segmentals that is the critical step which our

ancestors alone have taken. It has been proposed by P. Lieberman (1975) that this

transition was made possible by the phylogenetic descent of the larynx, and that the de-

scent was a special adaptation for speech. A more plausible view'to my mind is that the

descent of the larnyx, as well as a whole host of other skeletal restructurings in the head

and neck, was one of the many mechanical responses that the human body had to

make in assuming erect posture. In this latter view, where the structure was largely

available before the linguistic use, it would be more accurate to call it a case of

preadaptation.In any case, segmental phonology grew dominant over prosody, just as the

prosody in an earlier stage of emergence dominated gestures. All three systems con-

tinue to co-exist in every language today, functio~ing in mutually supplementary ways.

The importance of the transition into segmental phonology is highlighted by recent re-

searches on communicating with apes. Whereas chimpanzees show remarkable cogni-

tive abilities at symbolization, including the processing of complex sentence types, they

have next to zero ability at producing controlled segmental sounds. From an evolution-

ary perspective, that critical step which early man took in pairing messages with the par-

ticular medium of consonants and vowels was the start of the journey that led to

speech, the 'indispensable foundation' upon which language is built. Judging from the

amount of new brain tissue in the cortex that appears to be involved with language, that

step must have been taken quite some time ago (cf. A. Liberman 1974).

Although there may never be any way of documenting the transition directly, we can

Imagine how it could have come about by referring to processes of phonological

change that can be observed in recent times. These are of the type that has been

called 'phonologization.' Typically what happens is as follows. At time t1, one group of

words is distinguished from another group in that the former group has the phoneme X

while the latter has the phoneme Y. For reasons of coarticulation, X and Y act upon

their environments in different ways, i.e. XE' but YE", even though at t1 the difference be-

tween E' and E" is not considered distinctive, and may not even be noticed. But should

a merger take place by the time t2, when X> Y, then the two groups of words are no

longer distinguished by X and Y, but now by E' and E". The difference between E' and

E" becomes 'phonologized' at t2 -it has become phonemic.

70 LANGUAGE CHANGE

There are numerous such cases in the literature. Chinese, for one example, had

distinct voiced and unvoiced stops in syllable-initial position. Because of coarticulation,

the syllables with voiced stops must have had a different pitch contour from those with

unvoiced stops. (Compare the different pitch contours for the English words bin and

pin.) Some centuries ago, however, the voiced stops merged into the unvoiced ones.

Now the two groups of words are kept apart no longer by the voicing in the initial stop,

but by the tonal difference that was once caused by that voicing.

The transition from prosodic utterances to segmental utterances could not have

been this straightforward, of course, and must have taken place over a much longer

time span, probably with many false starts in the process. The segments started as

conditioned or spurious accompaniments of the prosodies, and were only eventually

'phonologized' by transference. Once the pairing between messages and the segmen-

tals got established, however, language must have evolved at an explosive pace, given

the much greater signalling potential and physiological economy of a segmental phonol-

ogy over alternative media.

Over the past several years there has been some significant research into the sign

language of the deaf. This work is of fundamental importance for the light it sheds on

language viewed from a different modality, and thereby giving us a broader perspective

on human communication. Experiments have been done on comparing the rates of

production and perception of speech with those of sign language. While such experi-

ments are of great intrinsic interest, it should be clear that certain questions of linguistic

macrohistory cannot be directly answered from their reslJlts. For even if it can be com-

pletely demonstrated that sign language is as effective as speech in every conceivable

way, which I would find totally surprising, the point remains that the user of the sign lan-

,guage is the direct beneficiary of numerous millennia of language evolution and elabora-

tion that had in fact taken place via speech. The deaf is deprived of only a minor J

peripheral part of that total neural machinery. The equivalence between modalities, if it

can be demonstrated, tells us that once the full symbolization system has been

developed in our brain, a surrogate medium may serve as well as speech. It tells us

nothing on whether the surrogate medium had enough to recommend it for language to

have evolved into its present state of intricacy and richness, which is clearly a stronger

requirement.

In contrasting the three scales of diachrony J I have perhaps put too much emphasis

on the differences between them. Clearly the three must be related to each other in in-

timate ways, since they are but three different time windows through which we are view-

ing the same phenomenon. At present, the facts are scanty. There are huge gaps in

our knowledge on the steps in which language evolved through the successive emer-

gent states into the present steady state. It is obvious that the study of linguistic univer-

sals must be centrally relevant here in providing a base line for the steady state. Similar-

Iy, our understanding of the relation between microhistory and the classical concepts of


linguistic change is spotty at best. A great deal of basic research needs to be done

before a plausible scenario can be provided for what has been called 'the life and

growth of language'.

Notes

1. A good beginning is the Cross-Cultural Conference on Language, Reading and Orthography, spon-sored by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Bethesda, Md., September1978. The proceedings are being edited for publication by J. Kavanagh and R. Venezky. An extensivediscussion of Chinese orthography from several viewpoints is available in the Journal of Chinese Lin-guistics 6.2, 1978; see especially the contribution by Ovid Tzeng et al. for recent psycholinguistic work.

(See also Hardych et al. 1977, 1978.)2. Of all the independent variables that influence change, probably the least stable and therefore most dif-

ficult ones to capture are the social ones. Note the perceptive couns~1 ,of a poet on this point,

Alexander Pope:

In words, as fashions, the same rule will holdAlike fantastic, if too new or old

Be not the first by whom the new are triedNor yet the last to lay the old aside.

3. There was, of course, no dearth of proponents for such discontinuity theories among philosophersworking before evolutionary thinking was developed in biology. See Stam (1976) for a useful historical

critique, especially from mid-18th century through mid-19th century in Europe.Once languages have reached a more-or-less steady state, these selectional pressures no longeroperate as they did during the emergent state. Labov's observations on language diversification beingdysfunctional (1972:273) are presumably based on the steady state changes, as indeed were the

remarks by Charles Darwin and Max Muller that Labov referred to.

4.

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This paper is prepared while I am a Guggenheim fellow