Questions: Internal Reconstruction

Question 1

English shows the alternation 'divine' [dɪˈvaɪn] ~ 'divinity' [dɪˈvɪnɪti], where the stressed vowel differs between related forms. What does internal reconstruction do with this alternation?

• A. It documents the alternation as an exception to regular sound-change laws and marks it as a loanword irregularity
• B. It posits an earlier form with a single vowel and identifies the conditioned sound change that produced two surface variants in different phonological environments
• C. It concludes the two forms are unrelated because a regular sound change would have produced identical vowels throughout the paradigm
• D. It uses the alternation to date the borrowing from Latin, since only loanwords preserve archaic alternations

Answer: (B)

Internal reconstruction treats synchronic alternations as fossils of historical processes. Given 'divine/divinity,' the method asks: what single earlier vowel, subject to what conditioned change, could produce this alternation? It posits an earlier form with a single vowel that changed in the unstressed environment of 'divinity' but not in the stressed environment of 'divine.' The conditioning environment — the phonological context in which each surface form appears — is the key datum. The alternation is not treated as an exception but as systematic evidence of a historical change, regardless of whether the words were borrowed.

Question 2

A linguist studying Language X finds that root-final consonants alternate between [p] and [f] before vowel-initial suffixes, but appear as [p] everywhere else. What does internal reconstruction conclude?

• A. The alternation is free variation — speakers randomly choose between [p] and [f] in that environment
• B. Language X borrowed words from two source languages, one with [p] and one with [f]
• C. An earlier form had [p] throughout; a conditioned lenition rule changed [p] to [f] before vowels, leaving the alternation as a synchronic fossil
• D. An earlier form had [f] throughout; [f] strengthened to [p] in all non-prevocalic environments

Answer: (C)

Internal reconstruction posits the simplest earlier form and the conditioned change that derives the alternating form. Since [p] appears in the 'elsewhere' (default) context and [f] appears only in the specific context before vowels, the most economical reconstruction is: earlier *[p] everywhere, with a lenition rule /p/ → [f] / __ V. Option D is logically possible but counter to the standard methodology: internal reconstruction derives conditioned forms from unconditioned base forms because the conditioning environment reveals the direction of change. The [p] in default contexts tells us [p] is primary; the [f] in the restricted context is the derived form.

Question 3

Internal reconstruction can recover the proto-language of a language family when no related languages survive for comparative analysis.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

This is a critical limitation. Internal reconstruction recovers a *pre-stage* of the single language being analyzed — an earlier state from which the observed alternations descended — but this is not the proto-language. The proto-language is the common ancestor of a language family; internal reconstruction only looks back within one branch. For language isolates, it is the only available method, but it cannot project back to some ancestral state beyond what its own alternation patterns reveal. Crucially, analogical leveling may have already erased earlier stages, making the recovered pre-stage more recent than the language's true origin.

Question 4

A paradigm showing no alternation — most forms of a word use the same consonant or vowel throughout — is proof that no historical sound change affected that paradigm.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

Absence of alternation is not evidence of absence of change. Analogical leveling is the process by which speakers regularize irregular paradigms, replacing alternating forms with a single uniform one. If a language once had an alternation but speakers extended one form throughout the paradigm, the surface evidence of the historical change is erased — and internal reconstruction cannot detect what it cannot see. A paradigm with no alternation might have been uniform throughout history, or it might have been leveled at some point, and internal reconstruction alone cannot distinguish the two cases without external evidence.

Question 5

Explain why internal reconstruction is especially valuable for language isolates, and what its fundamental limitation is in all cases.

Model answer: Internal reconstruction is valuable for language isolates because it is the only available method: no related languages exist for the comparative method. By analyzing synchronic alternations within the isolate — cases where a morpheme surfaces in different phonological shapes in different environments — the linguist posits earlier forms and the conditioned sound changes that produced them, recovering some of the language's history without external reference. The fundamental limitation is analogical leveling: speakers regularize irregular paradigms over time by generalizing one form throughout, erasing the alternation patterns the method depends on. Once leveling has occurred, that chapter of the language's history becomes invisible. The recovered pre-stage is always a lower bound on the language's age — changes that have been leveled away leave no trace.

This is why internal reconstruction and the comparative method are complementary. The comparative method reaches further back and can cross-check internal reconstruction using independently reconstructed proto-language forms. Where both methods converge on the same ancestral form, confidence is high. Where they diverge, the discrepancy is itself a research question about the language's history.