Abstract
In this chapter, we continue looking at sound change, but now we consider sounds as part of a phonological system. As phonemes are defined contrastively and function to distinguish meaning, the phonological system may react when phonetic change threatens existing distinctions. This may stop change from happening in the first place, or it may set in motion a chain of related sound changes. The Great Vowel Shift is an example of such a chain shift, and we discuss a number of ongoing chain shifts in different varieties of English. However, articulatorily driven change may also override the system and cause categories to merge or split. A closer look at the foot/strut and the trap/bath splits in the history of English forces us to reconsider the universality of Neogrammarian sound change and to discover lexical diffusion as a different pathway of change.
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Notes
- 1.
Note here that we are talking about the phoneme system of Old English. The voiceless fricative phonemes were pronounced as voiced fricatives in certain contexts, but as these contexts were predictable and there were no contrasts between voiced and voiceless fricatives as there were between voiced and voiceless stops, we say that Old English did not have voiced fricatives as a separate category.
- 2.
Because Grimm’s Law happened so long ago, and the end result of a push chain or drag chain is ultimately the same, we simply do not know for sure what type of chain shift Grimm’s Law really was.
- 3.
In present-day broad Australian English, /iː/ is phonetically produced as [ɪi], providing some evidence for this first step. There are potentially articulatory reasons for this: it is difficult to sustain precisely the same tongue position over a ‘longer’ period of time (some 100–200 milliseconds), and the slightly more lax start of the vowel represents the stage before the tongue reaches the (tense) target position.
- 4.
These examples come from a short (2:27) YouTube video from an early-2000s documentary where William Labov explains some of the experiments he has done around the NCS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UoJ1-ZGb1w.
- 5.
Word-initial /ð/ may also surface as /d/, so that /dɪs/ and /vɪs/ are both alternative pronunciations for this.
- 6.
- 7.
The most spectacular example of a merger is the Modern Greek phoneme /i/, which is the end result of historical mergers involving what were originally nine different vowels in Ancient Greek (Johnson 2010, p. 1).
- 8.
Long /uː/ itself was the result of the Great Vowel Shift applied to Middle English /oː/. This is why many words with [ʌ] or [ʊ] are spelled with ⟨oo⟩.
- 9.
Around the same time as the trap/bath split, words from the lot lexical underwent lengthening in similar conditions, resulting in the cloth lexical set. This also appears to have progressed with lexical diffusion and was later partially reversed, so that the outcome is even more haphazard (Wells 1982, p. 234).
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Knooihuizen, R. (2023). Phonological Change. In: The Linguistics of the History of English. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41692-7_4
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