Chain shift

In this paper I will be comparing Old Japanese non-back close vowels /i/ (i1 or kō-rui) and /ɨ/ (i2 or otsu-rui) in a post-nasal position with their North and South Ryukyuan cognates in order to propose Proto-Japonic reconstructions of Old Japanese [+ nasal] [+ high,-back] sequences. The paper establishes and analyzes six correspondence sets, each representing a different Proto-Japonic sequence: *mi, *muj, *me, *ni, *noj, *nuj, and briefly discusses a couple of yet different relevant Proto-Japonic reconstructions. The study is concluded with a proposal of relative chronology of the discussed changes from Proto-Japonic to Proto-Ryukyuan. A reconstruction of Proto-Ryukyuan *ɨ, a sixth segment added to Thorpe's 1983 classical five-vowel set, is argued for as a necessary development of post-nasal *oj and *uj. This is interpreted within the context of chain-shifting processes dating to Proto-Japonic as an important catalyst of mid-vowel raising in Proto-Ryukyuan.

Do extra-linguistic or linguistic factors determine the direction and outcome of structural linguistic change? This is a long-standing issue in historical linguistic theory with implications for several other sub-branches of linguistics. One of the most startling chain shifts known in linguistics is the Great Peninsular Scandinavian Vowel Shift affecting long back vowels, which in Swedish produces a typologically totally unique phonological opposition between vocalic outrounding and inrounding. The first phase of the shift is attested in all the central Scandinavian languages Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, but the Danish development comes to a halt already at this stage, while the other two languages continue the shift. Haugen (1970) pointedly asks “why do like causes not produce like results?”, concluding that the reasons are “clearly extra-linguistic” and that no structural answer to the question can possibly be given. Taking up this challenge the present paper re-examines the data and identifies a major structural entity — a vigorous ‘tenth’ vowel spread in the dialects over large areas of Peninsular Scandinavia, yet stigmatized in the standard languages, and overlooked by analysts — that neatly accounts for the difference of linguistic development.

Australian English (AusE) and New Zealand English (NZE) are two originally “transported” Englishes in the Southern hemisphere. Although there is currently no doubt among the scientific community that they constitute two distinct dialects of English with their own lexical, morphosyntactic, phonological and phonetic features, their description and representation have long been frozen into a unique “Australasian” dialect, in spite of an enormous amount of endocentric linguistic descriptions emerging in the second half of the twentieth century. AusE and NZE being amongst the latest varieties to have emerged in the English-speaking world, they have only recently been extensively studied and considered as valid research objects by the scientific community. In this article we first consider some historical arguments that eventually led to a misleading descriptive hotchpotch of AusE and NZE. This situation scarcely left any room for the possibility of specific phonological and/or phonetic variation within each variety, let alone the description of AusE and NZE as two separate linguistic entities in Australasia. After reconsidering a few parallel historical facts, common critical denunciations and lay theories on the origins of the two Austral varieties, the article focuses on the representation of AusE and NZE in the literature on the phonology of English accents around the world. With a view to contribute to the definition of AusE and NZE as linguistic objects in motion and to promote a dynamic portrait of each variety, we then provide contemporary oral data from the PAC programme as well as comparative analyses in favour of two major arguments for distinctiveness between AusE and NZE: rhoticity in NZE as well as the short front vowel shift in both AusE and NZE.

https://brill.com/downloadpdf/journals/jjl/5/1/article-p81_4.xml

The present article describes the vowel chain shift that occurred in the variety of Tajik spoken by Jewish residents in Bukhara. It identifies the chain shift as constituting of an intermediate stage of the Northern Tajik chain shift and accordingly tentatively concludes that in the Northern Tajik chain shift Early New Persian ā shifted before ō did, shedding light on the process whereby the present-day Tajik vowel system was established. The article is divided into three parts. The first provides an explanation of the variety of Tajik spoken by Jewish inhabitants of Bukhara. The second section explains the relationship between this particular variety and other varieties that have been used by Jews in Central Asia. The third section deals specifically with the vowel system of the variety and the changes that it has undergone since the late 19th century.

We re-analyse several patterns of chain shifts, so far attested in numerous literature on this topic, as evidence in favour of Minimize Satisfaction (1) in phonology.

(1) MinSat (‘Minimize Satisfaction’): Müller (2016)
An operation does not improve the satisfaction of more than one constraint.

Originally defined for analyses in Harmonic Serialism (McCarthy 2010), MinSat has been proposed to account for counter-bleeding phenomena such as the interaction of /k/-palatalization and /i/-deletion in Bedouin Arabic (McCarthy 2007), also extended exponence and the Merge over Move principle (Müller 2016). We show that, introduced to a parallel system such as OT (Prince and Smolensky 1993), MinSat can straightforwardly derive counter-feeding processes, represented here with case studies on vowel chain shifts (/A/ --> [B], and /B/ --> [C], but not /A/ --> [C]).