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Reality vs Fantasy
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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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Productivity and Regularity in Synchronic Phonology
In the same way, synchronic phonology is also regular, and describable through the same sorts of rules as diachronic phonology (though we should note that these are not describing the same object - synchronic phonological rules describe processes happening in a single human brain, while diachronic sound rules describe relationships between grammars that exist at different points in time, a meta-analysis, hence de Saussure's famous argument about the primacy of synchrony over diachrony).
What this means, in the context of the current conversation, is that if, as you say, the "phonetic easing" process is still active in modern English, you need to be able to provide a regular, exceptionless environment that can describe it.
You've attempted to do this to some degree with your consonant deletion examples (even if your proposed pronunciations for strong "the" and "to" are pretty dicey), but in order to prove that the sound law that produced the a/an alternation is still a regular phonotactic constraint in Modern English, you'll have to provide a regular synchronic sound rule that can exceptionlessly describe the phonetic environment of the constraint in question that leads to the deletion, which I don't think you'll be able to do.
Note that your proposed rule must not be specific to individual lexical items or refer to morphological or syntactic boundaries. This is because:
Structure is not Visible to Phonology - the Modularity of the Grammar
It's traditionally assumed by most generative linguists that the grammar is largely modular - that is, each phase of the generation of an utterance is separate, and proceeds one at a time with little overlap between the modules. So, syntax first builds the structure of the clause, and then morphology (which does not have access to the syntactic structure (though see Distributed Morphology for modern attempts to unite syntax and morphology)) builds words to fit into the structural positions that syntax built, and then phonology (which similarly cannot see either syntactic or morphological structure) determines the sounds that are sent off to be pronounced by the articulators. (Note that the actual relationships are a bit more complex - see Kiparsky's 1982 book on Cyclic/Lexical Phonology for a famous example that's pretty accessible, but the generalization holds well enough for the data we're dealing with here.)
What this means is that synchronic (and diachronic, for that matter) sound rules only ever apply in phonological environments, that is, to strings of phones and suprasegmental features like tone, stress, etc. (which does include prosody), and not to individual words.
So, in order for the "ease of pronunciation" constraint you're referring to here to still be active in Modern English, it must be describable as a phonological rule that applies exceptionlessly in a specific phonological environment, regardless of the words or structures that are actually present.
This is why I don't think you'll be able to show that the a/an alternation is still a regular, productive alternation in Modern English. The a/an alternation is not predictable - there is no general rule in English phonology of which its behavior is a subset. A child acquiring English just has to learn that for this specific morpheme, there's an "n" before vowels and no "n" before consonants, and, crucially, no generally describable phonological sequence in the language works this way.
We can test this with the analogy and borrowing tests above. First, through the analogy test, "my/mine" no longer behaves this way, because its behavior has been altered through a combination of analogy and grammaticalization - the sound law clearly no longer holds in its environment, so the phonotactic constraint that produced it is no longer active in the language. Second, and this is admittedly a hypothetical, I don't believe that any new monosyllabic word borrowed into English ending in -an (or -uw or -ij, for that matter) would show the same alternation in any environment, which would again indicate that the phonotactic constraint is no longer active.
All of this is because the regular sound change that originally produced this alternation is really just as fossilized as the medial f/v alternation: neither alternation can be successfully described using exceptionless synchronic sound rules, and must therefore be stored in the lexicon ("fossilized") and learned as exceptions by new acquirers.
(Note: Both of these alternations are morphologically/lexically-conditioned allomorphy, if you're interested.)
I hope this makes sense. Sorry if this was way too much info - it felt nostalgic, like being back in front of my third- and fourth-year undergrad students again, and I got a bit carried away. Also, I like your username. :)
Let me know if anything here is unclear or if you have further questions.
First, I got most of my linguistics education in German so sorry for my bad example when I was looking for an English one. If that's OK, I would use German ones from now on and try to give enough context.
I'm aware of this school of thought, I just didn't know people still subscribe to it. The narrative I was tought in uni was that when linguists found the first sound shift (Grimm's Law) and the second one (High German Consonant Shift) and the one in between (Verner's Law), they were hyped and felt they can math out everything, like a world formula, everything can be determined. But at some point, they realized it's much more messy and while there certainly are rules that work at a birds view level, the devil is in the detail and this approach can't explain every individual word. This might be a philosophical question tho: Is everything regular but we don't know all the rule or are there "real" exceptions?
I'm aware of borrowing and analogy but a factor you forgot to address is frequency. Frequently used words tend to get shortened and infrequently used words get more regular. I know this happens in English as well, but I rather use a German example than a bad English one: "haben" used to mean "to own" but when it became an auxiliary verb (as "to have" did in English), many forms got shortened and now form a paradigm unique in German (there is no analogy here). The "b" is omitted in 2nd and 3rd singular but not in 2nd plural which normally is the same as 3sg. Also: 1pl "(wir) haben" turns colloquial to "ham" while infinite and 3pl stay "haben". No regular sound shift or analogy or borrowing, just shortening of frequent words.
Verbs will shift between strong and weak conjugation: "küren" used to mean "to choose" and was a strong verb, now it has a specific meaning "to reward someone in a competition" and is more regular (unlike your outdated Sturtevant’s Paradox paper suggests ;) ). "Preisen" (to praise) is a loan word that turned into a strong verb.
And I know strong/weak verbs are analogy (while "haben" is not!), this points to a misunderstanding we seem to have: when I say "regular" I mean deterministic, you seem to mean there is a pool of rules you can pick and choose (different ways to get less regular for example). Chess is rule based as in you can't just move anywhere but there are still many options and maybe you castle a second time and no one notices. In German we sometimes differentiate between "Labyrinth" and "Irrgarten". In the former, there is always only one path but you feel lost anyway. This is how my 19th century countrymen thought of language change. In the latter, you have many crossroads and can end up in different places. I hope this analogy makes sense. I don't know if this difference also exists in English. And honesty, your "analogy to written language" (which I would rather call hypercorrectism but you can argue it's an analogy) is so arbitrary, at that point you can just argue anything and call it a rule, which is fine, there certainly is influence which I would rather call a tendency than a rule. BTW you could as well argue that this is loaned from a dialect that didn't make the shift but I don't know the data for that, might be wrong.
You repeat that like a dogma but don't give any logical explanation. As I tried to illustrate above, next to the bird eye view of regular sound shifts, frequent words will often work in their own logic because the more frequent a word is, the more important to – you guessed it – ease its pronunciation. I don't see how "easing the pronunciation" only applies to regular sound shifts and not to the shortening of frequent words (which also is part of language change).
Or to put it differently: I think you said at one point that it is a relic that used to ease the pronunciation but not anymore. Is that a statement you agree to? Because if so, when did it stop to do that and turned into a relic? That's what I meant when I said you make it into a dichotomy: it's a continuum and the a/an alteernation is closer to its beginning than to fossilization because it certainly still does the job and follows the same rule it used to, even tho it is the only word that follows this rule. If it only occurs in some lexemes (and I don't mean the lexeme "a" but the following one), then it is fossilized. Makes me wonder: Do you say "another" in your variety or "a other"? Because that would rather fit the v/f-example for me (especially if the "o" shifted to "wa" and there was no hiatus eitherway, just to illustrate my point not that this was a likely shift).
So sum things up:
Not that this matters to my argument but a little "fun fact" about me: While most of my lectures were given by generative linguists, my master thesis was about Role and Reference Grammar, a framework that explicitly tries to link morphology, syntax and pragmatics more closely together (phonology explicitly not tho). I currently read a book that includes prototype theory from cognitive linguistics which also is created in opposition to generative linguistics. I know this is still the predominant school of thought but I wish it wasn't. My master thesis was in Applied Computer Linguistics (with a strong emphasis on "computer" on my part tbh) and I also worked with Sumerian there too as you might have guessed :)
But to your point: If your theoretical framework doesn't allow something that happens, isn't that rather bad for the framework than for reality? Some famous guy once said: All models are wrong but some models are useful. Well, yours doesn't seem to be in this instance.
(Two more comments this time as well.)
To start off, its clear that our theoretical assumptions are irreconcilable (I might go so far as to say "diametrically opposed"), and that we are not going to agree here, but its important to note that my model is perfectly able to capture your German data.
It was a great example. There's no such thing as a bad example, because sound change is equally regular in every natural human language.
Yes, the vast majority of theoretical linguists, and practically all historical linguistics, both in America and in Europe (with much of the best European work still coming from Germany and the Netherlands), very much still subscribe to the regularity of sound change, because as far as we can tell, it's an empirical fact.
Also note that it's impossible to prove language relatedness without the regularity of sound change. Regularity of correspondence is literally the only metric we have that can prove relatedness, so if the Neogrammarian Hypothesis were somehow disproven (which is very unlikely), then the scientific underpinnings of the way we group languages into families immediately collapses.
(Also, yes, hypercorrection is another form of analogy, often called "interdialectic analogy".)
This is a great question, and technically it's still unproven (and may never be), but the hypothesis has been borne out in so much data for so many decades, with no convincing counterexamples, that there seems to be no good reason to disbelieve it.
OH! I should include the most important reason why the regularity of sound change is considered by most western linguists to be scientifically reliable - it makes predictions that are borne out by new data.
The Case of the Indo-European laryngeals
(This is an oversimplication of the events, because the data is complex and goes beyond the scope of our discussion here, but the (wikipedia page)[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory] is fairly good if you're interested.)
Basically, in the late 1800s, scholars working on reconstructing Proto-Indo-European were a bit confused - the reconstructed sound system (which is reconstructible, of course, due to the regularity of sound change) seemed to have two different systems of vowel alternations - a system unheard of in any of the world's languages.
Ferdinand de Saussure (yes, that Ferdinand de Saussure) realized that he could collapse both systems into one by positing an unspecified series of sonorant consonants (his famous coefficients sonantiques) that colored adjacent vowels in specific environments before disappearing entirely in all of the daughter languages. This resulted in a much simpler system that was also more typologically likely.
His contemporaries ridiculed him for reconstructing a proto-sound that disappeared in all of the daughter languages, but, once Hittite was deciphered in the early 1900s, shortly after de Saussure died, every single place de Saussure had predicted his "coefficients sonantiques" to show up in the proto-language, Hittite had an "h".
None of this is possible without the regularity of sound change, and we've seen the theory make predictions that are borne out by new data again and again.
Yes, linguists very much still subscribe to the regularity of sound change, both in the US and in Europe.
I didn't forget anything. While frequency is clearly a factor in language change, it's not relevant for sound change since it reduces to a prosody/stress change, which is a describable regular phonological environment that can be acted upon by regular sound rules.
In your "haben" example, for example, the grammaticalization of a main verb to an auxiliary verb clearly establishes a new prosodic pattern, which can be acted upon by regular sound change to the exclusion of other main verbs.
We see similar alternations in English main/auxiliary verb pairs:
I've already eaten. BUT
*I've a cheesburger. (In American English - Brits can do this)
I'm gonna eat a cheeseburger. BUT
*I'm gonna the store.
This is, of course, expected, since the grammaticalization of main verbs into auxiliary verbs results in a different stress/prosodic pattern (which I'm sure you can feel in German with "haben" as well), and so it's a perfect location for a regular and exceptionless sound rule to occur.
And these phenomena (and likely "haben"'s case also, though I'm not familiar with the literature) have been thoroughly treated in generative and historical literature perfectly satisfactorily for exactly this reason.
This is a common mistake made by those trying to "disprove" the Regularity of Sound Change - they don't invest enough time in phonology to understand that phonological domains larger than the word exist. It's actually kind of funny how elementary all of the "counterexamples" critics bring up always are - you'd think people would understand that a field that's over two hundred years old would have come across auxiliary verbs at some point during that time.
Also, you've asserted that "haben"'s change is not due to analogy or interdialectic borrowing, but I'm not sure where your certainty is coming from here. Without looking more deeply into the phenomenon, at this point the data you've presented could easily be described by sound change, analogy, or borrowing, and though I'm not familiar with that data specifically, I have no doubt that one or a combination of the three fully explains the data (because, again, one or a combination of the three fully explains literally all historical data that we've found so far).
I mean, it's an empirical fact of language going all the way back to de Saussure and Jan Boudoin de Courtenay's insight that phonemes have regular and predictable relationships with their allophones, but luckily there's also a clear physiological explanation for the regularity of synchronic phonology as well. (It's interesting that you're so interested in "explanation" now, but we'll get to that later).
The explanation comes from a combination of the nature of the movement of the articulators, and the fact that (as de Saussure famously noted), language is a regular system composed entirely of contrasts.
Humans articulate language by moving their articulators in a surprisingly small number of regular, precise, complex movements that they have been practicing since they acquired their language in childhood.
These movements eventually become second nature to the speakers, but humans always feel a constant pull between wanting the system to be as simple as possible (leading to regular sound change - our "ease of articulation" here), and wanting the system to have enough contrasts to adequately encode meaning.
That's why phonology is regular. That's it. It's a consequence of the nature of human articulation. Every time an American English speaker pronounces a /t/ between a stressed vowel and an unstressed vowel in a word, that /t/ becomes a flap, because of these millions of practiced, unconscious movements.
Note that this also means that American English speakers literally cannot (without practice) produce a different /t/ allophone in that position in one specific word. If the pronunciation of intervocalic /t/ were to change in one word, it must change in all of them (unless a different specific environment catalyzes a different regular change), because that sequence of articulator movements functions as a single unit.
Once again, it's an empirical fact that phonology is regular, and the regularity of sound change follows from it.
Also, the fact that synchronic phonology is regular is further proven by the fact that it's difficult to pronounce foreign language sounds. The mechanism is the same: we are only accustomed to pronouncing the relatively small set of regular movements in our native language, and altering those is difficult. It's just as difficult, if not more so, to spontaneously begin pronouncing one word in a way that doesn't conform to a language's phonotactics.
Yes, I agree with this statement, and I've already answered this question, but here it is again:
It stopped easing pronunciation as soon as the phonotactic constraints of the language changed to once more allow the sequence that was previously disallowed.
That's the answer.
And, once again, we can test for when this happens by looking for apparent exceptions to the sound rule in question (introduced later by borrowing, analogy, or subsequent regular sound change).
Once apparent exceptions appear, that indicates to us that the phonotactic constraints have changed, and that the sequence is once again being allowed in the language. At that point "easing pronunciation" no longer makes sense as a descriptor of the alternation (as in the case with the a/an alternation).
This is empirically incorrect. It also affected my/mine in exactly the same environment, and at the same time (12th cent. to 14th cent.) because, as mentioned, sound change is regular and exceptionless in its environment.
Now, let me ask you a question.
About the a/an alternation, you say that "in every instance it occurs, it demonstrably eases the pronunciation", but you never say how it eases the pronunciation, or what that even means to you. I, on the other hand, have given you thorough explanations and theoretical underpinnings for my position at every turn.
So, if it "demonstrably eases the pronunciation", then please do demonstate it. What's the strict, rigorous, definition of "easing pronunciation" (or whatever we want to call this) that you're using here, and how is it useful? That is, how does it make useful predictions about the data?
Because currently, your definition feels like something like "it feels better to speakers" or some equally un-useful metric. If "it feels better to speakers" is your definition (which I'm not saying it is - that's why I asked), then "I would have eaten the apple" would have "easier pronunciation" than "I eaten the apple", and I think that's a bad result for your position.
My definition would probably be something like: "a process that leads to a repair of some sort (by addition, deletion, etc.) to avoid a sound string that is disallowed by a language's phonotactics".
No other process would be easing pronunciation, because all other strings would be allowed by the language's phonotactics.
And, since the sound sequence represented by the "a/an" alternation is clearly allowed elsewhere by English's phonotactics, this process cannot, by definition, be easing pronunciation.
I suppose that depends on one's perspective, but since you're a functionalist, it certainly makes sense that you'd see it that way.
If one's framework doesn't allow something that happens, that's a good thing, because it means that the model is falsifiable, and therefore scientific. Since, as you correctly stated, all models are wrong, it should be the case that a good framework doesn't allow something that happens if you're actually doing science.
This is exactly my problem with Role and Reference Grammar, and functionalism in general - it's not falsifiable. Everything they do is descriptive - they just restate their data a dozen times in a dozen different ways and call it a day, without actually explaining anything. Nothing can prove them wrong, because they never actually say anything in the first place.
Of course they would want their models to be able to account for literally everything that could possibly happen, because they need to have room to describe it, whatever it is, and they don't care about making useful predictions.
Unfortunately, a model that is powerful enough to account for everything is, of course, also too powerful to actually do anything useful.
This is exactly why generative models are so specific and constrained - we want our models to be proven wrong by new data, so that we can revise them into better, more accurate models.
Luckily for me, though, none of the data you've brought up in this comment comes anywhere close to creating a problem for either the regularity of sound change, or generative linguistics in general.
A bit about me in return, I suppose.
I received my PhD in Linguistics in the mid-late 2000s focusing on the core subfields (generative phonology, morphology, and syntax) and historical linguistics, and then worked as an assistant professor for around five years, teaching, publishing, and supervising theses, before finally leaving the field for industry about ten years ago (though I try to stay relatively current on research).