Descrizione del progetto
Il cambiamento fonetico: risolvere l’enigma del perché A diventa B
I suoni delle lingue, un po’ come accade per gli alberi filogenetici, si sviluppano in nuove ramificazioni ed evolvono nel tempo. La sostituzione di un suono del linguaggio con un altro, o la perdita di un determinato suono, sono esempi di cambiamenti fonetici. I motivi dietro a tali modifiche sono una delle più grandi questioni irrisolte nell’ambito della linguistica. Il progetto SoundAct, finanziato dall’UE, affronta l’argomento chiedendosi perché le lingue si dividano e si diversifichino, attraverso una valutazione di fattori cognitivi, sociali e fonetici in combinazione tra loro. La fase di valutazione, che includerà attività di osservazione e modellizzazione, condurrà alla definizione di metodi predittivi che permetteranno di aprire la scatola nera e scoprire come un dato suono si trasformi in un altro.
Obiettivo
In William Shakespeare's times, 'knee' and 'knot' were pronounced with a /k/, just like German does today. But why did English and not German drop the /k/? This question is part of the actuation of sound change, recognised as one of the greatest challenges in linguistics, and which is about explaining why sound change happens, and why languages can follow such different paths of sound change. The actuation puzzle remains unsolved principally because the beginning of sound change is so gradual that it is undetectable even with modern instrumentation. Yet a breakthrough is essential for explaining why languages split and diversify. The project remedies this deficiency by determining how the cognitive mechanisms that control human speech processing, the social factors that bind individuals together, and the phonetic properties that shape a community's dialect, can, in combination, cause the sounds of the world’s languages to become unstable and change. The methodological innovation is to recast the elusive actuation puzzle as an empirically tractable transformation of an input (A) into an output (B). Here A and B are two closely related, geographically proximal, living dialects whose sound patterns differ in whether one or more common sound changes have taken place. The actuation puzzle is then solved with experiments in human speech imitation and computational modelling in order to estimate which combination of cognitive, social, and phonetic factors transforms A into B. Generalisation is achieved by selecting dialect pairs from Bantu, Indo-European, and Japanese languages that differ markedly in their sound patterns and sociocultural background. The wider scientific impact lies in the commonality with many disciplines including ecology, economics, and geoscience in understanding complex systems (here: language) in which interactions between sub-components (here: communicating speakers) cause transitions (here: sound change) that are unevenly distributed in time.
Campo scientifico
Programma(i)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
HORIZON-AG - HORIZON Action Grant Budget-BasedIstituzione ospitante
80539 MUNCHEN
Germania