Diachrony as a Source of Asymmetric Coding: Using the Past to Explain Naturalness

While much discussion on the role of the coding asymmetries relies on syn- chronic factors such as the nature of processing or more general cognitive, e.g. perceptual factors, in this paper I will focus on diachrony as a source of coding asymmetries. This is not meant to deny the relevance of the synchronic perspec- tive, but the stress on diachrony may help us understand that a number of phe- nomena can be structurally accounted for, i.e. are the way they are, because of their origin from earlier structural environments.