About the Journal

 

About

ISSN 2399-6714 (Online)

Papers in Historical Phonology (‘PiHPh’) aims to provide a high-profile, speedy, permanent and fully open-access place for the publication of interesting ideas from any area of Historical Phonology. 

PiHPh understands ‘Historical Phonology’ broadly (as set out in our Aims & Scope below) and seeks to bring together work from distinct linguistic subfields which may not otherwise communicate with one another.

PiHPh welcomes ideas that are still in development and offers a platform for the open discussion of these ideas, so comments on articles are an integral part of publication, as explained here.

PiHPh is a peer-reviewed, Open Access journal. All content is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence, unless otherwise stated. There are no fees to access or publish in the journal.

 

Aims & Scope

PiHPh welcomes submissions from all areas of historical phonology, and actively seeks to bring together work from distinct linguistic subfields which may not normally communicate with one another. The definition of 'historical phonology' that PiHPh adopts is set out in the Preface to PiHPh, which was published in the first issue. This definition is broad, taking in all areas of linguistics which link the study of sound systems to the past in any way. It is concerned both with how and why the phonology of languages changes in diachrony, and with the reconstruction of past synchronic phonological states. It is also concerned with the patterns of contemporary variation in phonology, in order to understand how change is implemented. Historical phonology is thus an inherently inter(sub)disciplinary enterprise — no one approach can hope to understand it fully. We need to combine insights from theoretical phonology, phonetics, sociolinguistics, dialectology, philology, language acquisition, and, no doubt, other areas. We need to interact with the traditions of scholarship that have grown up around individual languages and language families, and with disciplines like history, sociology and palaeography.

The kinds of questions that PiHPh wants to ask therefore include at least the following:

  • Which changes are possible in phonology?
  • What is the precise patterning of particular changes in the history of specific languages?
  • How do changes arise and spread through communities?
  • Are there characteristics that phonological changes (or particular types of changes) always show?
  • What counts as evidence for change, or for the reconstruction of previous stages of languages’ phonologies?
  • What kinds of factors can motivate or constrain change?
  • Are there factors which lead to stability in language, and militate against change?
  • To what extent is phonological change independent of changes that occur at other levels of the grammar, such as morphology, syntax or semantics?
  • What is the relationship between the study of completed phonological changes and of variation and change in progress?
  • What is the relationship between phonological change and (first and second) language acquisition?
  • What types of units and domains, at both segmental and prosodic levels, do we need in order to capture phonological change?
  • How can the results of historical phonology inform phonological theorising?
  • How does phonologisation proceed — how do non-phonological pressures come to be reflected in phonology?
  • How can contact between speakers of different languages, or between speakers of distinct varieties of the same language, lead to phonological change, or to the creation of new phonological systems?
  • How has historical phonology developed as an academic enterprise?

PiHPh has a vague link to the Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology, but the two have fully separate existences. PiHPh welcomes written-up versions of papers presented at the ESoHPh and would normally expect to publish them, but this will not be automatic — the normal PiHPh editorial process will apply. On the other hand, submissions to PiHPh are also positively welcomed from outside of the ESoHPh cycle. PiHPh hopes that anyone interested in Historical Phonology will submit their ideas for publication, whether they have any interest in the ESoHPh or not.

 

Governance & Ownership

Papers in Historical Phonology is owned and governed by the journal editors. Copyright to papers published within the journal issues are owned by their respective authors under Creative Commons licenses. The journal is published by the University of Edinburgh – a charitable body. Edinburgh Diamond – a service based within the University of Edinburgh Library – acts as the Publishing Partner by providing publishing services.

 

Indexing

PiHPh is indexed in the following databases:

 

Policies

Please see the Journal Policy page for information on preservation, copyright, licensing, open access, permissions, and privacy.

 

Publication Frequency

PiHPh publishes one issue per year. 

Each yearly volume of PiHPh has only one issue (so we do not use the concept 'issue'). Pagination for each volume begins with the first paper of the year and continues through all papers published that year. Papers are published as soon as they are cleared for publication. Each year, at the end of December, a volume is declared finished and the Table of Contents for that volume is finalised.