Lenition, Weakening and Consonantal Strength: Tracing Concepts Through the History of Phonology

To appear in: Brandão de Carvalho, J., Scheer, T. & Ségéral, P. (eds) Lenition and Fortition. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Available here: http://www.englang.ed.ac.uk/people/patrick2.html Lenition, weakening and consonantal strength: tracing concepts through the history of phonology 1. Tracing the history of an idea When does an idea start? This article investigates the ideas behind what phonologists now refer to as ‘lenition’, with the conviction that we can un- derstand concepts better if we know where they came from, how they devel- oped and how they have been used by theorists in the past. In doing this we will need to pick apart several concepts that are sometimes otherwise blurred together. We will see that some of these ideas can be traced back almost as far as it is possible to go in the history of phonology. Others are more recent, of course, and the particular constellation of ideas that make up the modern meaning (or meanings) of ‘lenition’ is arguably quite recent.1 It is common to claim that ‘lenition’ is a synonym of ‘weakening’ in phonology, and this clearly implies a notion of consonantal ‘strength’. These terms have long been connected, but the relationship between them is not straightforward - by investigating their shared and separate histories at least certain aspects of their interrelationship will become clear below. The focus here, though, is on ‘lenition’ (more narrowly, on ‘consonant lenition’), as it is in the volume that this article appears in. This focus on ‘lenition’ and ‘weakening’ will also mean that I largely ignore their uncommoner cousins ‘fortition’ and ‘strengthening’. While we lack the space to discuss this here, it seems to me exactly right to play them down, as cases of real fortition are vanishingly rare, and it is by no means obvious that they really are the literal ‘opposite’ of lenition. The importance accorded to lenition varies among phonologists. It played a major role in the development of some phonological theories (such as Natural, Dependency and Government Phonologies), but has been almost 1 I am grateful to everyone who has commented on this article or discussed aspects of it with me. This includes John Anderson, John Harris, Larry Hyman, Roger Lass, Tobias Scheer, Péter Szigetvári, Kie Zuraw and two anonymous reviewers. absent from the discourse of other frameworks (Standard Generative Pho- nology, for example, and Lexical Phonology). However, the consonantal changes or processes2 that the term refers to are widespread, and are regu- larly perceived to have something in common. Quite what they are perceived to have in common differs from framework to framework, as we shall see below. Some authors take these consonantal phenomena to be parallel to cases of (what they see as) lenition in vowels (for example, Donegan & Stampe 1979, Dressler 1985, Bauer 1988), but I only consider consonant lenition here, in keeping with the bias of a fair amount of previous work. It will not be simple to trace the history of ‘lenition’, or to say quite when or where the idea originated, for the different components of its current meaning originated at different places and times. Furthermore, tracing the origin of a word is not the same as tracing the history of the concepts that it refers to - the same concept could just as well have previously existed as the referent of a different word (or ‘signifier’). Indeed, as we will see, something along these lines was the case for the concepts considered below. Words and concepts can also diverge, with a word being used to describe different things than what it originally referred to, and the ‘original meaning’ of a particular term has no primacy in debates on its current meaning. This will necessarily be a selective trip through the history of phonology. In some cases, I can only cherry pick some choice discussion of the issues, when other work from the same period would be just as relevant. I consider work from both historical phonology and theoretical phonological, but our focus, to the extent that the two can be separated (for much of their history the two were pursued jointly), is on theoretical work. The discussion will require direct quotation from the work considered because the words used in these quotations are our actual data. Most of the discussion occurs in §3, which traces the notions of consonantal strength, weakening and lenition through the history of phonology. Before that, in §2, I make some necessary basic points that will guide the later discussion. §4 concludes. 2 It is probably true to say that most discussion of lenition is historical, comparing segments across chronological stages, but a large amount of work assumes that the segments involved are synchronically related by rule (or ‘process’). There is much to be said about the differences and similarities between synchronic processes and diachronic changes, but this is not the place to say it. I simply assume here that there is enough similarity between the two to for us not to be knocked too far off course if we ignore any differences between them here. For a more detailed con- sideration of the issues involved, see Honeybone (to appear). Lenition, weakening and consonantal strength 3 2. Starting points for a history of lenition and consonantal strength Before we consider the history of ‘lenition’ (and related terms), we need a preliminary definition of what they currently mean. This is provided in §2.1. In §2.2, I tease apart the conceivable varieties of phonological ‘strength’ that will be relevant below. §2.3 introduces the history of phonology, and §2.4 gives a framework to cope with the fact that the concepts of interest here have been discussed in several languages. §2.5 concludes this section with a fast-forward to the first time that the term ‘lenition’ was used in phonology. I consider it here to get it out of the way: a major contention of this article is that the event described in §2.5 was not that important for the history of phonology, or of lenition theory as it is currently pursued, because the basic concepts involved have been around in phonology practically from the start. 2.1. A first starting point: current definitions of ‘lenition’ The term ‘lenition’ can currently mean quite different things. Theory-specific definitions model lenition differently (for example: as feature spreading in Mascaró 1984, as the loss of privative features in Harris 1990, as the reranking of LAZY and faithfulness constraints in Kirchner 1998), and phonologists sometimes even disagree about which types of segmental change or process instantiate the concept (for example, the affrication of plosives is counted as lenition in Lass 1984 and Honeybone 2002, but not by Foley 1977 and Kirchner 1998). There is at least a ‘core’ concept of lenition that most phonologists accept, however, involving a relatively simple set of segmental changes. This section considers such basic definitions - on the basis firstly of prose discussions and secondly of lenition trajectories, which are the simplest way of summing up the current common core lenition concept. 2.1.1. Current definitions of ‘lenition’ One reasonable place to look for definitions of ‘lenition’ is second-order texts such as textbooks and dictionaries. This kind of work is intended to summarise the basic knowledge of the field, and therefore typically aims at the ‘core’ of complicated concepts. Two recent textbooks make at least one thing clear - ‘lenition’ and ‘weakening’ are synonyms: Outside the domain of assimilation in place of articulation, the most common segmental interaction between consonants and vowels (or, sometimes, other sonorants) is lenition or weakening. Typical examples of lenition in- volve either the voicing of voiceless stops, or the voicing and spirantisation of stops... Odden (2005, 239) lenition (also called weakening): consonants can be arranged on scales of strength.... The scales can be summed-up by saying that a consonant is stronger the more is differs from vowels; a consonant becomes weaker the more it comes to resemble a vowel. Ashby & Maidment (2005, 141) A number of other issues also arise here: Odden links lenition to an inter- sonorant context, and Ashby & Maidment raise the notion of strength scales. Particular types of lenition are mentioned (change of manner in spirantisation and change of segments’ laryngeal state in voicing), as is the notion that lenition is connected with the degree of ‘strength’ that a consonant possesses, and that this is a relative relation, with some consonants possessing more strength than others. The idea that ‘lenition’ and ‘weakening’ are synony- mous is almost universal in current work, as in the definitions in textbooks for synchronic theoretical phonology, such as Carr (1993, 24), Kenstowicz (1994, 35), Ewen & van der Hulst (2001, 13) and Gussmann (2002, 137), and for historical linguistics, such as Hock (1991), Trask (1996), Hock & Joseph (1996) and Campbell (1998). Trask’s Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics states lenition (also weakening) Any phonological change in which a segment becomes less consonant-like than previously. A shift in character from left to right along any of the scales in Table 5 [omitted here, but see the next section – PH] may be regarded as a lenition... Trask (2000, 190) In §3, we will see that ‘lenition’, ‘weakening’ and ‘strength’ have not al- ways been conflated, but the above shows that we need to trace the history of all three of them in order to get to the bottom of any one. 2.1.2. Lenition trajectories, scales and hierarchies As Ashby & Maidment’s and Trask’s definitions above show, it is common to connect lenition with phonological scales or hierarchies which rank con- Lenition, weakening and consonantal strength 5 sonants in order of their strength.

Load more