Sound structure and sound change: A modeling approach

Research in linguistics, as in most other scientific domains, is usually approached in a modular way – narrowing the domain of inquiry considerably, in order to allow for increased depth of study. This is both necessary, as well as productive, for a topic as wide-ranging and complex as human language. However, precisely because language is a complex system, tied to perception, learning, memory, and social organization, the assumption of modularity is also an obstacle to understanding linguistic competence at a deeper level. Modularity, in fact, can both create artificial theoretical problems, as well as obscure real theoretical difficulties. This book examines the consequences of enforcing non-modularity along two dimensions: the temporal, and the cognitive. Along the temporal dimension, synchronic and diachronic domains are linked by the requirement that sound changes must lead to viable, stable language states. Along the cognitive dimension, sound change and variation are linked to speech perception and production by requiring non-trivial transformations between acoustic and articulatory representations.