Workshop at ICHL28: Low-level and Experimental Phonetics in Historical Phonology

26-30 juillet 2027, Reykjavík (Islande)

Date : 26-30 juillet 2027
Lieu : Reykjavík, Islande
Contact : Lorenzo Maselli <maselli.lorenzo@tufs.ac.jp>
Appel de l’événement : lien
Date limite de soumission : 01 décembre 2026
Modalités de soumission : Abstracts should be submitted via EasyAbs : lien .Prospectives participants will be able to select this workshop (W11) during the submission process
Abstracts should include a descriptive title, main text and references. The maximum length for the abstract (excluding references) is 500 words. Papers can be submitted to a workshop or directly to the General Session. A paper submitted to a workshop but not accepted there may be considered for the General Session instead.

Argumentaire :

The relationship between phonetics and historical phonology has changed over decades of scientific linguistic investigation (Ohala 2017). In pre-structuralist and early structuralist thought, phonetics was primarily associated with diachrony and sound change (Osthoff & Brugmann 1878, Trubetzkoy 1939, Lehmann 1967, Jankowsky 1999) and was largely not treated as a potentially autonomous sub-discipline of linguistics (with some exceptions, notably Sievers 1881, Rousselot 1891). Saussure’s (1916) seminal distinction between what we now call phonology as the organisation of paradigms in a synchronic system and phonetics as their physical implementation susceptible to change in time did not challenge this post-Neogrammarian conception (Kiparsky 1974, Murray 2015).

The establishment of experimental and quantitative phonetics from the mid-twentieth century onwards considerably expanded the scope of the relationship between diachronic phonology and phonetics proper (Malmberg 1969, Ohala 1974, Mann & Repp 1981, Beddor et al. 1986, Kohler 2000, Stuart-Smith 2004). Low-level and instrumental approaches have provided new ways of addressing old questions in historical phonology, while the emergence of Laboratory Phonology and Articulatory Phonology (Kingston & Beckman 1990, Browman & Goldstein 1992, Pierrehumbert et al. 2000) has blurred the boundary between phonetic and phonological analysis. Phonetics has moved beyond providing evidence for independently formulated historical hypotheses: fine-grained acoustic, articulatory, and aerodynamic data can show patterns of variation and thereby contribute to developing new hypotheses about sound change (Janda & Joseph 2003, Demolin 2005). Part of this epistemological turn revolves around what Kiparsky (2015) calls “the constraints problem,” i.e. whether plausible sound changes should be grounded in “phonetic naturalness,” despite challenges to this teleological view (Zhang 2004, Blust 2005, Blevins 2007, 2008). Work on the origins and development of tone (Haudricourt 1954, Thurgood 2002; see also Öhman 1967) or labial-velar articulations in African languages (Connell 1998/1999, Maselli et al. 2023) provide a couple of examples of research resulting from this turn, but several more can be found.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers interested in phonetically informed historical linguistics. We particularly invite work using instrumental methods to investigate diachronic phonology from a synchronic-phonetic perspective, especially in underdescribed and minority languages / language groups. The workshop is interested in the following research questions:

• What is “phonetic naturalness” in sound change? How can low-level and experimental phonetics contribute to diachronic-phonological analyses based on the notion of “phonetic naturalness?”
• Is there a shared basis for defining “phonetic naturalness” across language families? Or are there genetic/genealogical/geographical constraints on what is considered phonetically natural in sound change?
• Should sound change always be (phonetically) motivated?
• How do available phonetic analyses fare in accounting for sound changes considered “unusual?”
• How can competing historical-comparative hypotheses about sound change be informed by low-level phonetic studies?
• Can low-level phonetic studies help formulate hypotheses about sound change?

We particularly encourage prospective speakers to submit:

• Contributions on attested phonetic pathways of sound change that bear on the question of “phonetic naturalness;”
• Contributions on phonetic analyses of unusual or hard-to-motivate sound changes;
• Studies of synchronic variation as evidence for diachronic processes;
• Articulatory, acoustic, aerodynamic, or other instrumental-phonetic analyses of historical-linguistic questions;
• Studies of tonogenesis and other processes of sound-system change triggered by identifiable articulatory dynamics;
• Contributions presenting experimental-phonetic and -phonological approaches to language reconstruction;
• Historical-linguistic contributions that adopt an explicit laboratory-phonological or articulatory-phonological framework;
• Historiographical appraisals of the within-discipline debate about the themes of this workshop.

We welcome contributions from any framework and on any language family, but especially encourage those on lesser known languages and/or less represented geographical regions.