Articulatory Effort

The notion of effort minimization has often been invoked as a source of explanation for particular sound patterns and sound changes, e.g. Grammont 1933; Zipf 1949; Stampe 1972; Lindblom 1983, 1990. Nevertheless, such appeals to effort minimization (and appeals to functionalist principles generally) have typically been received with skepticism by Generative phonologists, e.g. Anderson 1981, for three principal reasons.