Talk:Lexical diffusion

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[edit] "Noel Liebling"

I've removed the following paragraph, originally inserted by an anon editor then cleaned up by Ruakh, as my search of the web and library catalogues has not verified the existence of such a book by Noel Liebling (or indeed the existence of "Noel Liebling" himself) and the text as written suggests this is simply a conflation with Labov's own findings in Principles of Linguistic Change, already discussed in the article.

Noel Liebling, in Principles of Linguistic Change, argues that certain phenomena (such as metathesis and vowel shortening) tend to follow a lexical diffusion pattern, while others are typically or exclusively regular (such as vowel quality changes). He takes the position that regular sound change is similar to leveling in that it is a non-proportional type of analogy (respecting the Neogrammarian hypothesis).

Thylacoleo 03:54, 18 July 2007 (UTC)