Linguist Forum
Specializations => Phonetics and Phonology => Topic started by: sieledorothy on August 03, 2015, 03:49:08 AM
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Other than the common argument that metathesis is a sporadic and irregular process or tongue slips, WHY DOES METATHESIS OCCUR IN A LANGUAGE?
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It isn't necessarily irregular, but generally it can occur in very few environments, which gives the impression of irregularity and can reasonably be considered sporadic because it doesn't happen often. But there are also cases that are irregular.
Why does it happen? There are certain arrangements of sounds that are more natural than others for pronunciation, especially within the phonology of a particular language. Or there are sequences that are perceptually ambiguous. Consider -re/-er endings in some English/French words.
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I assume you are asking what historical change gives rise to metathesis. There is no single answer. One source (Leti) is a combination of stress shift, vowel harmony, and syncope of unstressed vowels utterance-medially. Another (Hebrew) is that affixation can give rise to unsyllabifiable consonant clusters which are resolved by metathesis. There is also place-based contact metathesis, where C.C is reordered in case of certain place of articulation combinations (coronal-labial is, I guess, a "dispreferred" output). You can get #VC → #CV when a language disallows vowel-initial words. Basically, you can always come up with a post-hoc story about why any sound change happens, but to know whether the story is actually correct for a particular case, you would have to look at the historical details of a specific sound change.
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Thanks a lot Panini. More interested in synchronic metathesis though. Appreciated!
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Thank you djr33. Always helpful
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More interested in synchronic metathesis though.
A suggestion: you should think about what you mean by "why", as applied to synchronic analysis.