scholarly journals Vowel Harmony: An Historical Account

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 106
Author(s):  
Emran R. Al Khattab
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Sound Change ◽  
Vowel Harmony ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
Continuous Change ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
English History ◽  
Continuous Growth ◽  
Over Time

All languages change over time. English has undergone continuous change throughout its three major periods: Old English (roughly from 450 to 1100 AD), Middle English (from 1100 to 1500), and Modern English (from 1500 to the present). Sound is one of the most easily influenced parts of language to be subject to different changes.  Sound change is inevitable and it is a live indication of the continuous growth of language. The evidence to prove the regularity and systematicity of sound change has been the main concern of linguists, This paper seeks to provide more evidence on how vowel harmony played a key role on the regularity of sound change by extracting samples of sound changes that have taken place throughout the English history.

scholarly journals Vowel harmony decay in Old Norwegian

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 11-48
Author(s):  
Jade J. Sandstedt
Keyword(s):  
Historical Record ◽  
Sound Change ◽  
Vowel Harmony ◽  
Historical Records ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Full Spectrum ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Phonological Feature ◽  
Occurrence Patterns ◽  
Over Time

Vowel harmony involves the systematic correspondence between vowels in some domain for some phonological feature. Though harmony represents one of the most natural and diachronically robust phonological phenomena that occurs in human language, how and why harmony systems emerge and decay over time remains unclear. Specifically, what motivates harmony decay and the pathways by which harmony languages lose harmony remains poorly understood since no consistent historical record in any single language has yet been identified which displays the full progression of this rare sound change (McCollum 2015, 2020; Kavitskaya 2013, Bobaljik 2018). In this paper, I explore the progression and causation of vowel harmony decay in Old Norwegian (c 1100–1350). Using a grapho‐phonologically tagged database of a sample of 13th‐ to 14th‐century manuscripts, I present novel corpus methods for tracking and visualising changes to vowel co‐occurrence patterns in historical records, demonstrating that the Old Norwegian corpus provides a consistent and coherent record of harmony decay. The corpus distinguishes categorical pre‐decay harmony, probabilistic intermediate stages, and post‐decay non‐harmony. Across the Old Norwegian manuscripts, we observe a variety of pathways of harmony decay, including increasing harmony variability via the collapse of harmony classes introduced by vowel mergers, the lexicalisation of historically harmonising morphemes, and trisyllabic vowel reductions which limit harmony iterativity. This paper provides the first detailed corpus study of the full spectrum and causation of this rare sound change in progress and provides valuable empirical diagnostics for identifying and analysing harmony change in contemporary languages.

scholarly journals Split coordination in English

Diachronica ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 310-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Taylor ◽  
Susan Pintzuk
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Rate Of Change ◽  
The Other ◽  
Argument Ellipsis ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Performance Effects ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Practical Demonstration ◽  
Over Time

Abstract In this article we provide a practical demonstration of how syntactically annotated corpora (treebanks), particularly the English Historical Parsed Corpora Series, can be used to investigate research questions with a diachronic depth and synchronic breadth that would not otherwise be possible. The phenomenon under investigation is split coordination, in which two parts of a conjoined constituent appear separated in the clause (e.g., and this is where my aunt lives and my uncle ). It affects every type of coordinated constituent (subject/object DPs, predicate and attributive ADJPs, ADVPs, PPs and DP objects of P) in Old English (OE); and it, or a superficially similar construction, occurs continuously throughout the attested period from approximately 800 to the present day. Despite its synchronic range and diachronic persistence, split coordination has received surprisingly little attention in the diachronic literature, with the exception of Perez Lorido’s (2009) limited study of split subjects in eight OE texts. Its modern counterpart is most frequently analysed as Bare Argument Ellipsis (BAE). Although the OE and Present-Day English constructions appear superficially similar, we show that not all of the OE data is amenable to a BAE analysis. We bring to bear different types of evidence (structural, discourse/performance effects, rate of change, etc.) to argue that split coordination in fact represents two different constructions, one of which remains stable over time while the other is lost in the post-Middle English period.

scholarly journals A construction of independent means: the history of the Way construction revisited

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 671-699 ◽  
Author(s):  
TERESA FANEGO
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Change Over Time ◽  
Front Door ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Form ◽  
Over Time ◽  
The Way

The emergence and development of the Way construction was famously examined by Israel (1996) in a study which traced the modern form of the construction to three senses or subschemas, namely manner of motion (He stumbled his way to the front door), means of motion (He dug his way out of the prison) and incidental activity (He whistled his way out of the room). The present article moves beyond the late Middle English period – the starting point of Israel's research – and looks at the precursors of the Way construction since Old English times, as well as its interaction with the Intransitive Motion construction (IMC) (He walked into the room). By approaching the data in terms of Goldberg's typology (1997) of verb-construction relationships, which is finer-grained than Israel's tripartite division, the analysis identifies the areas of conceptual and constructional overlap that have existed between the Way construction and the IMC in the course of history, and shows that the Way construction has gradually specialised in the expression of those relations which could not be readily coded in the IMC, such as means of motion and incidental activity. The study thus seeks to contribute to a better understanding of how the constructicon, the repertory of constructions making up the grammar of a language, may change over time.

Talking about MOTION in Middle English

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Huber
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The Other ◽  
Motion Verbs ◽  
Text Type ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
Contact Situation ◽  
Analysis Of Motion

Chapter 6 begins with an overview of the language contact situation with (Anglo-) French and Latin, resulting in large-scale borrowing in the Middle English period. The analysis of 465 Middle English verbs used to express intransitive motion shows that there are far more French/Latin loans in the path verbs than in the other motion verbs. The range of (new) manner of motion verbs testifies to the manner salience of Middle English: caused motion verbs are also found in intransitive motion meanings, as are French loans which do not have motion uses in continental French. Their motion uses in Anglo-Norman are discussed in terms of contact influence of Middle English. The analysis of motion expression in different texts yields a picture similar to the situation in Old English, with path typically expressed in satellites, and neutral as well as manner of motion verbs being most frequent, depending on text type.

scholarly journals Temporal trends in outcome and patient characteristics in dilated cardiomyopathy, data from the Swedish Heart Failure Registry 2003–2015

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Sjöland ◽  
Jonas Silverdal ◽  
Entela Bollano ◽  
Aldina Pivodic ◽  
Ulf Dahlström ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Heart Failure ◽  
Dilated Cardiomyopathy ◽  
Temporal Trends ◽  
Physical Symptoms ◽  
Left Ventricular ◽  
Left Ventricular Ejection ◽  
Continuous Change ◽  
Ventricular Ejection Fraction ◽  
Increased Risk ◽  
Over Time

Abstract Background Temporal trends in clinical composition and outcome in dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) are largely unknown, despite considerable advances in heart failure management. We set out to study clinical characteristics and prognosis over time in DCM in Sweden during 2003–2015. Methods DCM patients (n = 7873) from the Swedish Heart Failure Registry were divided into three calendar periods of inclusion, 2003–2007 (Period 1, n = 2029), 2008–2011 (Period 2, n = 3363), 2012–2015 (Period 3, n = 2481). The primary outcome was the composite of all-cause death, transplantation and hospitalization during 1 year after inclusion into the registry. Results Over the three calendar periods patients were older (p = 0.022), the proportion of females increased (mean 22.5%, 26.4%, 27.6%, p = 0.0001), left ventricular ejection fraction was higher (p = 0.0014), and symptoms by New York Heart Association less severe (p < 0.0001). Device (implantable cardioverter defibrillator and/or cardiac resynchronization) therapy increased by 30% over time (mean 11.6%, 12.3%, 15.1%, p < 0.0001). The event rates for mortality, and hospitalization were consistently decreasing over calendar periods (p < 0.0001 for all), whereas transplantation rate was stable. More advanced physical symptoms correlated with an increased risk of a composite outcome over time (p = 0.0043). Conclusions From 2003 until 2015, we observed declining mortality and hospitalizations in DCM, paralleled by a continuous change in both demographic profile and therapy in the DCM population in Sweden, towards a less affected phenotype.

scholarly journals Norse against Old English: 20-0

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anders Holmberg
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
West Germanic

The conclusion seems inescapable, if the facts in Emonds & Faarlund are more or less right: Middle English would be the outcome of a shift from West Germanic grammar to an eccentric form of North Germanic grammar.

Positive and negative face as descriptive categories in the history of English

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 178-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas H. Jucker
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
General Trend ◽  
Clear Distinction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Negative Face

Studies in the history of politeness in English have generally relied on the notions of positive and negative face. While earlier work argued that a general trend from positive politeness to negative politeness can be observed, more recent work has shown that in Old English and in Middle English face concerns were not as important as in Modern English and that, in certain contexts, there are also opposing tendencies from negative to positive politeness. In this paper, I focus in more detail on the notions of positive and negative face and follow up earlier suggestions that for negative face a clear distinction must be made between deference politeness and non-imposition politeness. On this basis, I assess the usefulness of the notions of positive and negative face for the development of politeness in the history of English.

scholarly journals The Affix Changes from Middle English to Modern English Found In The Miller's Tale Written by Geoffrey Chaucer and Its Modern English Version

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Egi Putriana ◽  
Jufrizal Jufrizal ◽  
Fitrawati Fitrawati
Keyword(s):  
Data Analysis ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
Qualitative Method ◽  
English Language ◽  
English Version ◽  
New Words ◽  
History Of ◽  
Vowel Change

The history of English language has three periods of time; Old English, Middle English, and Modern English. The linguistic forms in English development are different each period. This research aims to find out one of the changes, that is, the affix changes from Middle English to Modern English form that found in both of The Miller’s Tale Story Middle English and Modern English versions. This research also aims to find out the spelling changes in affixes. This research used descriptive qualitative method. The data, which are the collection of words that have affixes found in The Miller’s Tale, were identified based on the base of the words and its affixes and its were classified based on the type of its functions. Based on data analysis, there are seven affixes in Middle English which have been changed in Modern English form. These changes occur in the deletion of vowel, change of vowel, substitution of the affix, and elimination of the affix. The spelling change also influenced the change in suffixes. Some of the vocabularies change into the new words and some of the words change only in its vowel.

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