Preface

A historic event, A Dialogue on Sound Change: Past, Present and Future brought together two eminent scholars, Professor William Labov and Professor William S-Y. Wang, for the first time on the campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong on 16 May 2012.

Both towering figures in the field, their seminal ideas have shape and advanced the theory of sound change. It was an extraordinary occasion where the two scholars were engaged in a dialogue and exchanged their views with the hindsight of 40 years of research in an open forum. The debate featured newly developed technology, notably the dynamic motion diagram tracing sound changes in Philadelphia and some exciting new insights.

One recurrent theme was how the insights of lexical diffusion and regular sound change might be made compatible. Professor Labov’s metaphor of “words floating on the surface of sound change”suggests one solution. He explains:

The results of lexical diffusion over time may be converted abruptly by merger of the categories or by redefinition to a phonetically defined opposition. It is evident that such a collapse of lexical diffusion can occur by merger. What is new is the redefinition to a phonetically defined opposition. It reinforces our confidence that language learners can and do acquire new patterns that are entirely defined phonologically without reference to lexical identity.

Professor Wang related diffusion to social networks and to the phonetic basis of sound change:

I hear from some of your words that there are important elements that we certainly ought to consider. It is not just the change diffusing across the lexicon. It is also the change diffusing from speaker to speaker. It is also the change diffusing from community to community,from village to village…We must not forget that language is produced by a body with all sorts of physiological, muscular, neural properties.So sound change must be considered together very tightly with this phonetic basis. I think one very clear piece of evidence for this is that if you go through handbook after handbook of sound changes, you find most of them are unidirectional.

On the wider importance of sound change, Professor Labov noted:

A good question we should all think about is: how important is sound change itself as compared to linguistic change as a whole? And one point of view is that great grammatical change is triggered off by sound change, so that its influence, or its importance is greater than the domain that it covers.

Asked about the innate basis underlying sociolinguistic variation,Professor Labov introduced a new possibility:

There is an inborn tendency of children to want to learn a communicative system which is as general as possible. And that is what drives them to ignore idiosyncracies of their parents to learn the community’s language. This is quite possibly a social development which has an innate basis, evolutionary basis.

These are just some tantalizing highlights that await the reader.All of these insights will inspire students and colleagues with renewed rigour and vigour for generations to come.

The Dialogue was an academic event jointly organized by the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, the Department of Chinese Language and Literature and the Language Acquisition Laboratory. We gratefully thank Thomas Lee, Director of the Language Acquisition Laboratory for co-organizing the event and moderating the forum. We thank the panel of specialists in Chinese historical linguistics and sociolinguistics comprised of Professor Chinfa Lien, Professor Ka-Yin Benjamin Tsou and Professor Daming Xu. Thanks are also due to the invited scholars and the participants who attended the Dialogue and contributed to the stimulating dialogue.

A number of former students of Professor Labov and Professor Wang were participating in the forum, representing a form of intergenerational transmission. Present in the audience was an interdisciplinary group of scholars from fields as diverse as psychology, engineering and medicine as well as comparative syntax and contact linguistics. We were pleased to have a number of internationally renowned scholars join us on this special occasion.

After more than a year’s follow-up work, we have completed the transcription of the entire event including the two speeches by Professor Labov and Professor Wang and the Question and Answer sessions. We would like to thank Professor Stephen Matthews and Professor Shi Feng as well as Tsai Yaching, Deng Xiangjun, Angel Ayala, Mai Ziyin and Xia Quansheng for their dedicated efforts in transcribing the original recordings, translating from English to Chinese and checking and polishing the entire transcription.

Funding support from the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre and the Research Centre for Chinese Linguistics which has made the publication of the present volume possible is gratefully acknowledged.

We take responsibility for the omissions and shortcomings in this work. We welcome the comments of readers.

Professor Feng Shengli
Director, Research Centre for Chinese Linguistics
Department of Chinese Language and Literature
Chinese University of Hong Kong
and
Professor Virginia Yip
Director, Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre
Chairperson, Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages
Chinese University of Hong Kong

August 2013