This is a thoroughly revised and expanded version of a book published earlier under the same title in 1972. It has been redrafted as an introductory text-book for students of linguistics by giving copious examples and also exercises and recommended readings. It has been prepared with students of the Indian subcontinent in mind, as the examples derive primarily from the languages (Dravidian, Indo-Aryan and Tibeto-Burman) of this area.

Sounds help us understand the world around us. This engaging title provides a close-up look at the science behind different sounds. Readers discover how sound waves travel through different matter and learn about concepts such as echoes, volume, and pitch. Accessible language and relatable examples support reader comprehension.

This volume showcases the current state of the art in phonologization research, bringing together work by leading scholars in sound change research from different disciplinary and scholarly traditions.

Research on sound change often focuses on vowels, yet consonantal sound change also offers fascinating insights into language development and variation. This pioneering book provides a detailed investigation of consonantal sound change in English, by analyzing a large corpus of specifically designed field recordings from Austin, Texas. It offers one of the most in-depth analyses of /str/-retraction to date, drawing comparisons with studies of change in the distinguishing phonetic features of other varieties of English, and with studies of /str/-retraction in other Germanic languages. It further deepens our understanding of sound change by including qualitative data to position the sound change in the social reality of Austin, showing that specific sound changes are universally driven by age, gender and ethnicity. The results provide a testing ground for models of sociolinguistic and sound change, and highlight the importance of the social fabric of language in modeling language change.

Examines advanced approaches to sound change from various theoretical and methodological perspectives, including articulatory variation and modeling, speech perception mechanisms and neurobiological processes, geographical and social variation, and diachronic phonology.

The renowned historical linguist Hans Henrich Hock once commented that, for reasons that are not well understood, there sometimes appear "curious gaps" in the bilabial slot of languages' series of obstruent phonemes. Hock based his comment on the observation that if a language lacks a voiceless stop at one of the cardinal points of articulation, the missing segment is almost always /p/. Labial Instability in Sound Change (Explanations for the loss of /p/) explains the driving force behind this phenomenon. The theory advanced by the book accounts for why, over time, languages lose the /p/ sound more often than any other voiceless stop (sounds of a similar class). The book describes the phenomenon of "labial instability" in articulatory and acoustic terms. Labial Instability in Sound Change argues for a particular school of sound change (John Ohala's phonetic theory) while clarifying the complex relationships among speech perception, acoustic and articulatory phonetics, language typology, and sound change.

This book presents a thorough investigation of the main diachronic changes that have taken place in the palatal sounds of the Romance languages, as well as their current patterns of synchronic variation. André Zampaulo draws on extensive data not only from diachronic sources, but also from a range of current phonetic, phonological, and dialectal studies to motivate a formal, constraint-based account of palatal sound change. The analysis takes into account the role of phonetic information in the shaping of phonological patterns, approaching sound change from its inception during the speaker-listener interaction and formalizing it as the difference in constraint ranking between the grammar of the speaker and that of the listener-turned-speaker. The volume offers insights into how and why similar types of change may take place in different varieties and/or the same language at different times, and will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in historical linguistics, phonetics and phonology, Romance linguistics, and dialectology more broadly.