Re: Reduction and Grammaticalization

From:    Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...>
> I've recently been doing a lot of reading about how languages evolve
> TAM, person marking, case markers etc... one of my presents for
> Christmas was a book called "grammaticalization" which I asked for.
> Typically I've thought of the "wearing down" of words as being almost
> entirely due to regular sound changes but I'm beginning to wonder if
> this is true, if sometimes changes can occur in the most often used
> words and phrases which don't occur in the entire lexicon.
Indeed, such changes are well-known.  For example, in my own dialect
of English, the auxiliary verbs "is" /Iz/ and "was" /w@z/ have colloquial
allomorphs /Id/ and /w@d/ when negated:  /Idn=t/ and /w@dn=t/, alongside
more formal /izn=t/ and /w@zn=t/.  In some other Southern American dialects
(primarily those west of the Apalachians), this sound change has spread to
other words which have the same phonological environment, such as "business"
/bIdnIs/; but for most, including me, this is restricted to the auxiliaries.
This is more evidence supporting Zwicky and Pullum's argument that "n't" is
now a negating affix, not a clitic.

> Example:
> gonna from going to... obviously the word boundary disappeared for them
> to merge, but still /goInt@/ or something similar must for a start have
> assimilated nt to get n, a sound change I'm not sure has happened in
> recent english at least.
Perhaps not in your dialect, but in most American ones I hear, it occurs
all the time.  The fact that it's ongoing is supported by the countless
attestations of "internet" as [Inr=nEt].  This might be due to an
extension of the intervocalic flapping rule in American English to
cover /ntV/ sequences, or perhaps due to the crosslinguistic markedness
of nasal + voiceless sequences.

> So can a small number of
> clitics etc and grammatical words simply be worn down and simplified by
> constant use rather than more widespread regular sound changes?
Yep. It's been said that if Sapir had been doing fieldwork on English
speakers, we'd have paradigms for things like [doUntS@], [kUdZ@], etc.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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