Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Phonological variation, change and asymmetries: in support of Pertinacity

Aditi Lahiri

University of Oxford

'Not everything goes', a familiar phrase, can be applicable to phonological and morpho-phonological variation, observable in synchronic systems, change and processing. The well-known speaker-listener relationship is fraught with difficulties. The listener has to cope with a speaker’s utterances which can be irregular and variable. Variability can occur on various levels — segmental, metrical as well as tonal. The level of variation is however, constrained, and the ways to deal with it are observable in texts as well as in speech. We will discuss a model which tries to account for the ways in which the variability is channelled to make comprehension possible and change accountable. Diachronic phonological evidence as well as support from a series of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiments will be provided from a variety of languages including Bengali, Dutch, English and German.