Modelling the distribution of consonant inventories
by taking a functionalist approach to sound change

   Paul Boersma, University of Amsterdam
   December 1989

The development of any sound system aims at three goals:
maximizing the ease of articulation, minimizing confusion by maximizing
the perceptual distinctions *between* utterances,
and maximizing the perceptual salience *within* utterances.
The interaction between these functional optimization principles is such
that a proposed sound change is honoured if the majority of these principles
would be satisfied.

Such a decision regime 'only' requires knowledge of the *rank orderings*
(nothing measured in numbers) of the articulatory ease and the perceptual
salience of sound sequences, and knowledge of the rank orderings of
dissimilarities of pairs of words. Under this regime, the sound patterns
of languages will keep changing forever (perhaps cyclically),
even if there are no external influences on them. The direction of the
Germanic consonant shifts, for example, follows directly.

Selected statements:

"It will be rewarding to discriminate between articulatory and perceptual space."

"In [mt] there are three gestures that have to coincide more or less.
 As a strict simultaneity is impossible, this can only be achieved by choosing
 one out of six ways in which these three contours can be ordered. This choice
 depends on the grammar of the language in question, especially [...] on how
 much importance the language attaches to several kinds of perceptual invariance."