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Reviewed by:
  • Word frequency and lexical diffusion
  • Robert W. Murray
Word frequency and lexical diffusion. By Betty S. Phillips. (Palgrave studies in language history and language change.) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Pp. xiv, 252. ISBN 9781403932327. $80 (Hb).

It is well over a century since Schuchardt (1885:25) published his now famous pronouncement that in sound change frequently used words hurry ahead while less frequently used ones lag behind. The seeming innocuousness of this catchy phrase is misleading, for in it lies a challenge to fundamental neogrammarian assumptions about sound change. The neogrammarians practiced an incipient structuralism, and for them—just as for later structuralists and generativists—it was the sound within a sound system that changed. In this kind of (pre)structuralist view, lexically based differential rates of change (lexical diffusion) are unexpected. Although most linguists over the decades have been content to ignore Schuchardt—ascribing lexical diffusion to superficial performance factors or assigning it the dreaded 'epiphenomenal' epithet—there is also a more or less continuous Schuchardtian tradition running parallel to the neogrammarian one in which there has been an attempt to fully investigate the empirical basis and theoretical implications of Schuchardt's pronouncement. Phillips' book, firmly grounded in this tradition with modern embedding in connectionist, usage-based phonological theory (see Bybee 2001), is particularly welcome in bringing together and refining over two decades of the author's research on the interrelationship of sound change, lexical diffusion, and word frequency—especially in light of historical data derived from English. The book is provocative and challenging, as it must be coming from a linguist who has embraced what would seem to be an inevitable consequence of the Schuchardtian line: namely, that it is the phonological system itself—'being an extraction from pronunciations of the words and phrases of the language' (3)—that is epiphenomenal. Each chapter is well laid out, and the key issues are confronted head on in a clear and concise writing style.

The first chapter briefly outlines the parallel neogrammarian and Schuchardtian traditions. Neogrammarian-based approaches make a fundamental distinction between two types of sound change. On the one hand, there is—what is now usually called—regular neogrammarian change (Lautwandel), which is phonetically gradual, regular in the sense of applying across-the-board to all pertinent lexical forms, and unconscious. On the other hand, there are changes that are phonologically abrupt, irregular in the sense that individual lexical items are targeted with possible diffusion through the lexicon, and conscious (socially driven borrowing). An idealized version of this dichotomy has found a secure place in every introductory linguistics textbook, where the ominous qualification provided by one of the most renowned neogrammarians, Eduard Sievers (1901:272), is conveniently forgotten: namely, that it can 'be difficult to clearly determine the border between abrupt and regular change'. In fact, as P's work aptly confirms (see also Blevins 2004:259–78), Sievers's warning resonates to the present day. For the long line of researchers who have attempted to refine and formalize the distinction—recently, for example, Paul Kiparsky and William Labov—it has been a tough slog, and in spite of now well over a century of neogrammarian-based research, success in delimiting the two types has never been achieved. Of course, this predicament would come as no surprise to Schuchardt who, with his very different view of sound change, would no doubt have enjoyed the 'I told you so' moment: ALL sound [End Page 487] changes generalize by phonetic analogy, spread by lexical diffusion, and involve a certain degree of consciousness; there is no fundamental difference between the spread (borrowing) of a change from person to person vs. the spread of a change from dialect to dialect (see Vennemann 1972 for a discussion of Schuchardt's approach).

For P, however, the Schuchardtian view requires an essential refinement. Sound changes—both phonetically abrupt and gradual—diffuse from more to less frequently used words (as emphasized by Schuchardt), but they can also diffuse from less to more, and it is the exploration of the interplay of factors determining directionality of diffusion that constitutes the core of P's monograph. In a nutshell, the bidirectional patterns are based on...

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