Conditioning

This chapter explores multiple aspects of the conditioning of sound change, with a focus on regular (‘Neogrammarian’) changes. It is argued that a theoretically informed view of conditioning must recognize the non‐trivial nature of the mapping between sound changes as observed in the empirical record and the grammatical changes they derive from. The chapter develops an account of several key notions, such as the differences between conditioned and unconditioned sound changes, the link between the context and the nature of the change, and the respective role of bottom‐up and top‐down systemic factors in the conditioning of sound change. It is shown that the framework of the life cycle of phonological processes provides an explicit formalization of the link between phonetic and phonological changes and offers some tools useful in analyzing various kinds of conditioned sound change.