ABSTRACT
As I pointed out in Chapter 3, changes in the sequence of speech sounds making up the pronunciation of particular words are termed ‘syntagmatic change’. Change in the phonological system of a language, in contrast, is called paradigmatic change. Recall from Chapter 2 that both French and English have undergone paradigmatic change – they have acquired new consonant phonemes – by borrowing words from each other: that is, the phonological system of each language has changed as a result of borrowing. Much more commonly, however, phonological systems change as a result of changes in pronunciation of the sort discussed in Chapter 3. In this chapter, we’ll be looking at the various ways in which this can happen, and we’ll also be asking whether we can understand such system changes in terms of linguistic theory.
