Category-shifting Change in Real Time
Name of applicant
Rasmus Puggaard-Rode
Title
Postdoctoral Fellow
Institution
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Amount
DKK 1,899,313
Year
2024
Type of grant
Reintegration Fellowships
What?
The project investigates sound change in language as it is happening, focusing on how speech sounds cross boundaries betwen major structural types. The project takes ongoing changes in certain Danish consonants as a case study, namely the case of /d/ seemingly becoming vowel-like when appearing after a vowel, and the development of /t/ in an /s/-like direction in the beginnings of words.
Why?
Direct evidence of the kind of sound change that disrupts linguistic structure is scarce, but can tell us much about how linguistic structure works. Only few studies have investigated how sound change comes about in 'real time', and the linguistic diversity of these studies is very limited, so the project will surely expand what we know about the mechanisms of sound change.
How?
The project will use a huge existing corpus of interviews with speakers from different parts of the Danish speech community. These interviews were made with the same speakers decades apart, which allows the project to explore how sound changes are implemented by speakers in 'real time' since the 1970s. These recordings will be analyzed within the broad methodological framework of corpus phonetics.