Chain shifts and transphonologizations are driven by homophony avoidance

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Phonology
• Language Change

Background:

• Human languages balance the need for clear communication with the desire to simplify pronunciation.
• Phoneme mergers simplify inventories but can reduce the number of distinct words.
• Previous research linked merger likelihood to the number of words distinguished by a contrast.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how lexical properties influence phoneme inventory changes beyond simple mergers.
• To examine chain shifts and transphonologizations, which preserve word contrasts.
• To test the hypothesis that contrasts with greater word-differentiation value are more resistant to merger.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of phoneme inventory changes across a diverse set of languages.
• Quantification of the contribution of phoneme contrasts to word differentiation.
• Comparison of the frequency of mergers versus chain shifts/transphonologizations for contrasts of varying lexical importance.

Main Results:

• Phoneme contrasts that differentiate more words are less likely to merge.
• These high-differentiation contrasts are more likely to undergo chain shifts or transphonologizations.
• The type of phoneme inventory change is significantly influenced by the lexicon's specific word distinctions.

Conclusions:

• Phoneme inventory structure is not independent of the lexicon, contrary to traditional theory.
• Language change is shaped by usage-driven pressures balancing effort reduction and communicative function.
• Findings support models of efficient coding and category learning/usage in language evolution.