Resumen de The Effect of Usage Predictability on Phonetic and Phonological Variation
Predictability, broadly construed, is in a complex relationship with many aspects of phonetic and phonological variation. The overall trend is that linguistically predictable items tend to be more phonetically reduced, and more likely to undergo processes of markedness reduction, than less predictable items; however, there are exceptions. This chapter reviews three categories of theoretical models dealing with these relationships: perceiver-oriented, producer-oriented, and passive evolutionary models. Predictability can be defined as the extent to which the presence of a linguistic element—such as a word or a phoneme—can be predicted by an idealized observer. The chapter also introduces frequency, semantic predictability, and discourse mention as specific operationalizations of predictability. Continuous variation occurs along a spectrum, with an infinite range of possible values. There is a robust body of evidence suggesting that unpredictable speech tends to be less intelligible than predictable speech.
