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MODELLING THE DISTRIBUTION OF CONSONANT INVENTORIES BY TAKING A FUNCTIONALIST APPROACH TO SOUND CHANGE

Certain kinds of sound inventories are more widely found in the world's languages than other kinds. Identifying a language with its speakers, we can state that languages show a preference for certain kinds of sound systems at the cost of other ones. Every language has attained its sound inventory in the course of a long-termed development involving many sound changes. In this paper we will adopt the proposition that it is these very sound changes that have let the language acquire the preferable collection of sounds. We will therefore model sound changes as optimizations of sound systems. 2. PRINCIPLES THAT OPTIMIZE SOUND SYSTEMS According to Passy (1890), sound changes have the same cause that motivates the existence of language itself: people speak in order to be understood, and only to be understood. This functionalist approach manifests itself in two principles: 1) Languages tend to get rid of anything that is superfluous. This principle could be called the law of least effort, but Passy prefers (after Sweet) the term principle of economy, as it is also assumed to trigger processes like the loss of unaccented vowels, which presumably trades the articulatory effort of the resulting consonant clusters for the smaller time needed to finish the utterance. Among the processes ascribed to this principle are the weakening of accent and the subsequent loss or paradigmatic merger of sounds in unimportant syllables, the simplification of consonant clusters, assimilation, and the abridgement of long vowels. 2) Languages tend to stress or exaggerate anything that is necessary. This is the principle of emphasis. First, processes like aspiration and affrication of plosives are considered to be due to this principle, as well as vowel epenthesis, glide insertion, dissimilation, and the change of approximants into fricatives or plosives. The second action of this principle is that of increasing the distinction between two sounds in order to reduce confusion between different words. Kawasaki (1982) draws our attention to the acoustic correlates of these two aspects of the principle of emphasis, pointing out that sequences of acoustically similar sounds such as [wu] or [ji] are avoided in the world's languages in favour of sequences with a greater acoustical dynamic variation like [wi] or [ju], and that poorly distinguishable sequences such as [gla] and [dla] tend not to co-occur in languages. In her words, languages tend to maximize salience and dissimilarity, respectively.