PHOIBLE inventories suggest that diachrony contributes to the appearance of feature economy

Abstract

We hypothesize that diachronic change affects phonological inventory structures leading to the seeming feature economy of synchronic inventories. We generated feature hierarchies using the Iterative Dichotomiser 3 algorithm with natural inventories from the PHOIBLE database and randomly generated inventories. Variance in segment number is both higher and increases more with feature number for natural languages. This increased variation is partially due to the efficient utilization of secondary features in larger natural inventories. We argue that feature economy is emergent from the fact that sound change tends to produce series of segments, rather than an independent drive towards feature economy.