Old and Middle English Phonology

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donka Minkova
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Vowel Length ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Stress Assignment ◽  
Syllable Weight ◽  
Voicing Contrast ◽  
Short Vowels ◽  
Separate Branch ◽  
English System

Old English (OE) is a cover term for a variety of dialects spoken in Britain ca. 5th–11th century. Most of the manuscripts on which the descriptive handbook tradition relies date from the latter part of the period. These late OE manuscripts were produced in Wessex and show a degree of uniformity interrupted by the Norman Conquest of 1066. Middle English (ME) covers roughly 1050–1500. The early part of the period, ca. pre-1350, is marked by great diversity of scribal practices; it is only in late ME that some degree of orthographic regularity can be observed. The consonantal system of OE differs from the Modern English system. Consonantal length was contrastive, there were no affricates, no voicing contrast for the fricatives [f, θ, s], no phonemic velar nasal [ŋ], and [h-] loss was under way. In the vocalic system, OE shows changes that identify it as a separate branch of Germanic: Proto-Germanic (PrG) ē 1 > OE ǣ/ē, PrG ai > OE ā, PrG au > OE ēa. The non-low short vowels of OE are reconstructed as non-peripheral, differing from the corresponding long vowels both in quality and quantity. The so called “short” diphthongs usually posited for OE suggest a case for which a strict binary taxonomy is inapplicable to the data. The OE long vowels and diphthongs were unstable, producing a number of important mergers including /iː - yː/, /eː - eø/, /ɛː - ɛə/. In addition to shifts in height and frontness, the stressed vowels were subject to a series of quantity adjustments that resulted in increased predictability of vowel length. The changes that jointly contribute to this are homorganic cluster lengthening, ME open syllable lengthening, pre-consonantal and trisyllabic shortening. The final unstressed vowels of ME were gradually lost, resulting in the adoption of <-e># as a diacritic marker for vowel length. Stress-assignment was based on a combination of morphological and prosodic criteria: root-initial stress was obligatory irrespective of syllable weight, while affixal stress was also sensitive to weight. Verse evidence allows the reconstruction of left-prominent compound stress; there is also some early evidence for the formation of clitic groups. Reconstruction of patterns on higher prosodic levels—phrasal and intonational contours—is hampered by lack of testable evidence.

Constraint ranking in Middle English stress-shifting

1997 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donka Minkova
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Stress Assignment ◽  
Syllable Weight ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Constraint Ranking

Developing an idea first articulated by Luick in 1896, Halle & Keyser (1971) posit the introduction of a new accentuation rule in Middle English (ME), the weight-sensitive Romance Stress Rule (RSR). All post-1971 accounts of English stress take the syllable weight principle of the RSR as their starting point. For twenty-five years there has been no scrutiny of the assumption that syllable weight became relevant for stress assignment in ME. It has been claimed, and the claims have not been addressed, that the RSR is part of the phonology of late OE (O'Neil, 1973), that by late ME the RSR had completely replaced the Germanic accentuation patterns (Nakao, 1977), and that the existence of the RSR in ME justifies the reconstruction of analogical pronunciations such as hardi, holi, riding(e), a real shift from the Germanic to the Romance category (Halle & Keyser, 1971; Luick, 1896). The paper refutes these claims on the basis of new evidence and analysis in terms of generalized prosodic constraints.

Syllable Weight, Prosody, and Meter in Old English

Diachronica ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donka Minkova ◽  
Robert P. Stockwell
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Major Change ◽  
Morphological Properties ◽  
Stress Assignment ◽  
Syllable Weight ◽  
Main Stress ◽  
English Verse ◽  
Triggering Conditions ◽  
Phonological Rules

SUMMARY Nearly all recent studies of Old English prosody have argued that main stress is fixed by phonological rules which make reference to syllable weight. We claim that such arguments are wrong, partly because they depend on still dubious assumptions about the scansion of Old English verse, and partly because the hypotheses they construct violate an essential axiom of prosodie theory, that a single syllable is the domain of stress. Stress assignment rules based on morphological properties are both simpler and less exceptionable in Old English. We argue that a major change between Old and Middle English is the reanalysis of stress assignment as a phonologically rather than morphologically based rule, and we suggest some possible triggering conditions for that diachronic reanalysis. RÉSUMÉ Presque toutes les études récentes sur la prosodie du vieil anglais ont prétendu que l'accent primaire est déterminé par des règles phonologiques qui font référence au poids de la syllabe. Nous rejetons de tels arguments parce que, d'une paît, ils dépendent de suppositions douteuses sur la scansion des vers du vieil anglais et parce que, d'une autre part, les hypothèses qu'ils construisent violent un axiome essentiel de la théorie prosodique, c'est-à-dire l'idée que le domaine de l'accentuation est délimité par la syllabe. En vieil anglais, des règles d'accentuation basées sur des propriétés morphologiques s'avèrent à la fois plus simples et moins sujettes aux exceptions. Nous prétendons qu'un changement majeur entre le vieil anglais et le moyen anglais est justement la réanalyse de l'accentuation comme règle motivée par des facteurs phonologiques plutôt que morphologiques et nous suggérons quelques conditions de déclenchement possibles pour cette réanalyse diachronique. ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Die meisten neueren Arbeiten zur altenglischen Prosodie gehen von der An-nahme aus, daB der Hauptakzent eines Wortes durch phonologische Regeln determiniert sei, die auf das Silbengewicht Bezug nehmen. Unserer Meinung nach ist diese Auffassung unzutreffend, und zwar aus zwei Griinden. Zum einen beruhen diese Analysen auf derzeit noch unbewiesenen Annahmen hin-sichtlich des altenglischen Versmetrums, und zum anderen stehen sie im Wi-derspruch zu einem wesentlichen Axiom der Prosodietheorie, nämlich daB die einfache Silbe die Domäne der Betonungszuweisung ist. Eine solche Zuwei-sung der Betonung aufgrund von morphologischen Eigenschaften ist hingegen nicht nur einfacher, sondem erfordert fiir das Altenglische auch weniger Aus-nahmen. Die Autoren gehen davon aus, daB sich zwischen dem Altenglischen und dem Mittelenglischen eine wesentliche Veranderung vollzogen hat, und zwar die Zuweisung der Wortbetonung auf phonologischer statt auf morpho-logischer Grundlage. Ferner behandeln wir verschiedene Bedingungen, die diese diachrone Reanalyse ausgelost haben konnten.

scholarly journals Syllable weight, vowel length and focus in Lebanese Arabic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niamh Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Syllable Structure ◽  
Short Vowel ◽  
Vowel Duration ◽  
Consonant Cluster ◽  
Vowel Length ◽  
Syllable Weight ◽  
Contrastive Focus ◽  
Short Vowels ◽  
Levantine Arabic ◽  
Lebanese Arabic

Research on a variety of languages has shown that vowel duration is influenced by phonological vowel length as well as syllable structure (e.g., Maddieson, 1997). Further, the phonological concept of a mora has been shown to relate to phonetic measurements of duration (Cohn, 2003; Hubbard, 1993; Port, Dalby, &amp; O'Dell, 1987). In Levantine Arabic, non-final closed syllables that contain a long vowel have been described as partaking in mora-sharing (Broselow, Chen, &amp; Huffman, 1997; Khattab &amp; Al-Tamimi, 2014). The current investigation examines the effect of vowel length and syllable structure on vowel duration, as well as how this interacts with durational effects of prosodic focus. Disyllabic words with initial, stressed syllables that were either open or closed and contained either a long or a short vowel wereexamined when non-focused and in contrastive focus. Contrastive focus was associated with longer words and syllables but not vowels. Short vowels were shorter when in a syllable closed by a singleton but not by a geminate consonant, while long vowels were not shortened before coda singletons. An analysis is proposed whereby long vowels followed by an intervocalic consonant cluster are parsed as open syllables, with the first consonant forming a semisyllable (Kiparsky, 2003), while long vowels followed by geminate consonants partake in mora-sharing (Broselow, Huffman, Chen, &amp; Hsieh, 1995). The results also indicate compensatory shortening for short vowels followed by a singleton coda.

Syllable weight in monolingual and heritage Spanish

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 395-427
Author(s):  
Michael Shelton ◽  
Hannah Grant
Keyword(s):  
Reading Proficiency ◽  
Naming Task ◽  
Error Rates ◽  
General Effect ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Stress Assignment ◽  
Syllable Weight ◽  
Bilingual Speakers ◽  
Quantity Sensitivity ◽  
Analysis Of Error

AbstractThis study presents two experiments employing a naming task that test the modulation of stress assignment by syllable structure in Spanish. The first replicates the findings of a previous study in which words containing arguably heavy penultimate diphthongs provoke higher error rates than putatively light monophthong controls when marked for antepenultimate stress. This result is interpreted as support for quantity sensitivity in the language. This experiment also replicates a subtler finding of differential patterning between rising and falling diphthong in their interaction with Spanish stress, suggesting gradient sensitivity to patterns in the lexicon. The second experiment presents the results of an identical task with Spanish-English heritage speakers in which the general effect of syllable weight is replicated, while the effect of diphthong type does not emerge. An analysis of error types suggests that varying levels of reading proficiency among heritage speakers may have led to the lack of the latter result, while still revealing sensitivity to frequencies in the lexicon. The combined results are offered as further evidence of quantity sensitivity among both monolingual and bilingual speakers of Spanish and provide further data in the understudied subfield of heritage phonotactics.

Phonemically contrastive fricatives in Old English?

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
DONKA MINKOVA
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Relative Strength ◽  
Internal Factors ◽  
Place Of Articulation ◽  
Voicing Contrast ◽  
History Of ◽  
Interdental Fricatives

The article addresses two recent hypotheses regarding the history of the English fricatives /f/–/v/, /s/–/z/, /θ/–/ð/: the hypothesis that phonemicization of the voicing contrast occurred in Old English, and the related claim that the reanalysis of the contrast was due to Celtic substratum influence. A re-examination of the arguments for early phonemicization leads to alternative interpretations of the observed voicing ‘irregularities’ in Old English. The empirical core of the article presents the patterns of alliteration in Old and Middle English; this kind of evidence has not been previously considered in evaluating the progress of the change. The analytical core of the article is dedicated to the dynamics of categorization based on edge vs domain-internal contrasts, the relative strength of the voicing environments, and the distinction among fricatives depending on place of articulation. A comprehensive LAEME and MED database of all relevant forms reaffirms the traditional position regarding French influence for the phonemicization of voicing for the labial fricatives. The categorization of the contrast for the interdental fricatives is a language-internal prosodic process, and the history of the sibilants requires reference to both external and internal factors. The shift from a predominantly complementary to a predominantly contrastive distribution of the voiced–voiceless fricative pairs has been occurring at different rates for a whole millennium. The claim that phonemicization is attributable to Celtic influence in Old English is empirically and theoretically unsubstantiated.

scholarly journals Effects of Surprisal and Entropy on Vowel Duration in Japanese

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason A. Shaw ◽  
Shigeto Kawahara
Keyword(s):  
Shannon Entropy ◽  
Vowel Duration ◽  
Vowel Quality ◽  
Vowel Length ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Short Vowels ◽  
Word Duration ◽  
Communicative Efficiency ◽  
Linguistic Units ◽  
Positive Effect

Research on English and other languages has shown that syllables and words that contain more information tend to be produced with longer duration. This research is evolving into a general thesis that speakers articulate linguistic units with more information more robustly. While this hypothesis seems plausible from the perspective of communicative efficiency, previous support for it has come mainly from English and some other Indo-European languages. Moreover, most previous studies focus on global effects, such as the interaction of word duration and sentential/semantic predictability. The current study is focused at the level of phonotactics, exploring the effects of local predictability on vowel duration in Japanese, using the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese. To examine gradient consonant-vowel phonotactics within a consonant–vowel-mora, consonant-conditioned Surprisal and Shannon Entropy were calculated, and their effects on vowel duration were examined, together with other linguistic factors that are known from previous research to affect vowel duration. Results show significant effects of both Surprisal and Entropy, as well as notable interactions with vowel length and vowel quality. The effect of Entropy is stronger on peripheral vowels than on central vowels. Surprisal has a stronger positive effect on short vowels than on long vowels. We interpret the main patterns and the interactions by conceptualizing Surprisal as an index of motor fluency and Entropy as an index of competition in vowel selection.

Serialism and locality in constraint-based metrical parsing

Phonology ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 481-526 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Pruitt
Keyword(s):  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Standard Theory ◽  
Metrical Structure ◽  
Local Interactions ◽  
Local Systems ◽  
Stress Assignment ◽  
Syllable Weight ◽  
Harmonic Serialism ◽  
Non Local ◽  
Constraint Ranking

This paper proposes a model of stress assignment in which metrical structure is built serially, one foot at a time, in a series of Optimality Theory (OT)-style evaluations. Iterative foot optimisation is made possible in the framework of Harmonic Serialism, which defines the path from an input to an output with a series of gradual changes in which each form improves harmony relative to a constraint ranking. Iterative foot optimisation makes the strong prediction that decisions about metrical structure are made locally, matching attested typology, while the standard theory of stress in parallel OT predicts in addition to local systems unattested stress systems with non-local interactions. The predictions of iterative foot optimisation and parallel OT are compared, focusing on the interactions of metrical parsing with syllable weight, vowel shortening and constraints on the edges of prosodic domains.

scholarly journals Vokalquantitätsverschiebungen in ausgewählten Dorfwillküren aus dem 17. und 18. Jh. Eine graphematisch-phonematische Studie

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 67-79
Author(s):  
Piotr A. Owsiński
Keyword(s):  
Spoken Language ◽  
Vowel Length ◽  
Short Vowels ◽  
Language Analysis ◽  
Early New High German ◽  
Characteristic Features

The marking of the vowel length in selected village charters from the 17th and 18th centuries. A graphemic-phonemic studyThe paper presents the results of the language analysis of the Early New High German village charters from the 17th and 18th centuries which come from: Archiwum Komisji Prawniczej, Volume XI, Warszawa/Kraków/Łódź/Poznań/Wilno/Zakopane, 1938 and Targowski 2013. The scriveners are unknown. The center of attention are the ways of marking of the long and short vowels, which came into being owing to the lengthening and shortening of the vowels in the Early New High German time. The aim of the article is to determine to what extent the script fixes the features of the spoken language. The author introduces the results of his analysis, illustrating the characteristic features with appropriate examples.

scholarly journals A phonetic study of length and duration in Kyrgyz vowels

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Ziv Stern ◽  
Jonathan North Washington
Keyword(s):  
Spectral Component ◽  
Vowel Length ◽  
Short Vowels ◽  
Measurement And Analysis ◽  
Final Stress ◽  
High Vowels ◽  
Phonetic Duration ◽  
Phonetic Study ◽  
Future Work ◽  
Vowel Categories

This paper examines the phonetic correlates of the (phonological) vowel length contrast in Kyrgyz to address a range of questions about the nature of this contrast, and also explores factors that affect (phonetic) duration in short vowels. Measurement and analysis of the vowels confirms that there is indeed a significant duration distinction between the Kyrgyz vowel categories referred to as short and long vowels. Preliminary midpoint formant measurements show that there may be some accompanying spectral component to the length contrast for certain vowels, but findings are not conclusive. A comparison of F0 dynamics and spectral dynamics through long and short vowels does not yield evidence that some long vowels may in fact be two heterosyllabic short vowels. Analysis shows that duration is associated with a vowel’s presence in word-edge syllables in Kyrgyz, as anticipated based on descriptions of word-final stress and initial prominence. However, high vowels and non-high vowels are found to consistently exhibit opposite durational effects. Specifically, high vowels in word-edge syllables are longer than high vowels in medial syllables, while non-high vowels in word-edge syllables are shorter than non-high vowels in medial syllables. This suggests either a phenomenon of durational neutralisation at word edges or the exaggeration of durational differences word-medially, and is not taken as a case of word-edge strengthening. Proposals for how to select from between these hypotheses in future work are discussed.

scholarly journals Lenisering etter kort vokal: relikt-fenomen eller opphav?

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-241
Author(s):  
Gjert Kristoffersen
Keyword(s):  
Small Group ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Short Vowel ◽  
Final Position ◽  
Vowel Length ◽  
Two Stage ◽  
Stressed Syllable ◽  
Limited Distribution ◽  
Short Vowels ◽  
Stage Process

The topic of the paper is a small group of Norwegian dialects where lenition of p, t, k into b, d, g in intervocalic and word-final position is limited to words characterized by a monomoraic, stressed syllable in Old Norse. These dialects are spoken in the easternmost local communities in Agder county, at the eastern margin of the South-Norwegian lenition areas where lenition hit all short oral stops irrespective of preceding vowel length. After the quantity shift had made all stressed vowels bimoraic, with rimes being either VV or VC, the distribution of the lenited plosives are after both long and short vowels (the main area) or after short vowels only (the eastern marginal area). Haslum (2004) argues that the limited distribution in the east ist the result of a reversal after long vowels only. While this cannot be refuted as a possibility, I argue below that it may also be the result of a two-stage process, whereby lenition after a short vowel has spread further than the generalized process.

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