Self-organization and Categorical Behavior in Phonology

Finished · Usage-Based Theories

Summary

Wedel argues that phonology is a self-organizing system, in which order emerges from local processes that have their characteristics amplified over time due to growing strength of their similarity pressures on other/future elements in the system. The pattern is amplified over time until the process is seems to provide a directed structure to the system as a whole. Self-organizing systems exhibit 3 essential characteristics: (1) Patterns arise from competing/conflicting pressures at the local level. Specifically, in phonology, perhaps ease of articulation (in the form of a production bias) conflicts with pressures for similarity (in the form of a paradigm similarity bias) to generate incomplete neutralization in individual tokens that are strengthened over time until incomplete neutralization is regular. (2) A system is made up of smaller elements (in phonology, phones or features), and the interaction of elements A and B are not identical to the interactions between A and C or B and C. The reason for this is that the relative similarity of elements in a system can influence their interaction, such that more similar items more readily influence one another. (3) The timecourse of language change is not contained within the local timecourse of change. That is, individual changes within a single generation are smaller and the system is somewhat identifiable in similarities to the previous generation's language. Over time, however, because these small changes/errors from a previous generation are propogated into the next generation's use of the language, the errors accumulate to result in large-scale language change over many generations. Thus, the prior state of the system strongly influences future states. This can be termed iterated learning.