English has long been suspected to be a vowel-shifting language. This hypothesis, often only adumbrated in previous work, is closely investigated in this book. Framed within a novel framework combining evolutionary linguistics and Optimality Theory, the account proposed here argues that the replacement of duration by quality as the primary cue to signaling vowel oppositions has resulted in the 'shiftiness' of many post-medieval English varieties.
Frequently asked questions
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes, you can access Vowel-Shifting in the English Language by Kamil Kaźmierski in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Linguistics. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
The general research question that this book sets out to answer is this: why has English become a vowel shifting language? Naturally, lurking in such a question lies already the assumption that it has. Looking at the history of English, one indeed gets the impression that its vocalic system, to some extent stable for long periods of time spanning the separation of English from Germanic up to characteristic of it ever since. A major development, or set of developments, that make this transition particularly noticeable is the Great Vowel Shift (GVS), through which the entire long vowel system of English was reorganized, in that all long vowels raised by one degree of height, with the exception of the already all long vowels raised by one degree of height, with the exception of the already following words in the seventeenth century are considered, for instance, then following words in the seventeenth century are considered, for instance, then each word had a vowel quality which its neighbor to the right had in the fifteenth century: make > meat > meet > might; boat > moon > house. Since the Great Vowel Shift, a number of other comprehensive reorganizations of the vocalic system have taken place, including the Short Vowel Shift in early Modern English (lowering and centralizing all short vowels apart from the already low and central /a/), as well as a number of contemporary developments such as the Northern Cities Chain Shift, the Southern Shift, the New Zealand Shift, or the Australian Shift. Given the number of contemporary vowel chain shifts, together with the relative stability of English vocalic system before the Great Vowel Shift, it does seem that English has acquired the trait of ‘shiftiness’, or, at the very least, that the rate at which it undergoes shifts has increased.
The Great Vowel Shift, a major reorganization which affected all long vowels of the language, has been the topic of heated discussions for over a century, proving to be a fertile ground for countless publications. It, along with other vowel chain shifts, has been investigated from a number of distinct, if intimately related, vantage points. The present account, in contrast to many previous attempts, does not seek to explain any of the particular chain shifts, but rather addresses the question of why such shifts are so frequent in Modern English in general.
The first kinds of questions that historical linguists ask themselves are those of the identification and the dating of individual changes. Based on written evidence, they try to reconstruct the relevant developments. Already the first descriptions of the Great Vowel Shift, however, involved attempts not only at reconstructing, but at explaining the mechanism behind it. As soon as the shift was presented in a way which enabled its description to a high degree of generality, that is in a clear pattern, whose graphic visualization is very suggestive, questions as to the causality involved in it began to pose themselves. Thus, the second kind of questions were asked, namely how the Great Vowel Shift develop, and what kinds of mechanisms were involved. An instantiation of this is the controversy whether the Great Vowel Shift was a push chain (Luick 1921—1940) or a drag chain (Jespersen 1909—49), for example. The descriptions of which vowels moved where are largely agreed on, but the two views contrast as to what the underlying mechanism was, that is whether the shift was caused by the two close vowels
and
vacating their places consequently filled by close-mid
and
(a drag chain) or by the close-mid vowels
and
moving up and pushing
and
out of their places (a push chain). Regardless of which account is preferred, though, it is assumed by both that there is a causal link between the individual changes of the shift, and so coherence of the group of events is postulated. This assumption has later been called into question, and there has been a long-standing debate whether any sort of internal coherence can be ascribed to the Great Vowel Shift at all (Stockwell and Minkova 1988a; Lass 1988; Stockwell and Minkova 1988b; Lass 1992a). This is the third perspective from which questions about the Great Vowel Shift have been asked, and this question boils down to the following: was there even such a ‘thing’ as the Great Vowel Shift? In addition to dating and describing the shift, to explaining the mechanisms behind it, and debating whether internal coherence of it can be assumed which would warrant belief in the very existence of the Great Vowel Shift, another question of explanatory nature that has kept many researchers busy is that of why this shift happened. The search for a triggering event, referred to since Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog (1968) as the ‘actuation has been answered in wildly differing ways. Some place the reasons outside of language, starting from the War of the Roses (Ellis, referred to in Wolfe 1972: 7), in the adaptation of East Midland speakers to the prestige Central Southern variety (Perkins 1977), in the attempts of the London bourgeoisie to distance itself from speakers of the Kentish and Essex dialects (by exaggerating [sic!] the pronunciation of the latter) (Leith 2002: 140); others have looked for causes within the language itself, as in the physiological aspects of strong stress in English (Lotspeich 1921), the Germanic tendency to root initial stress (Lotspeich 1927), in the raising of the high-mid vowels (Luick 1921-1940: 554), in the application of a natural process which laxes high vowels (Stampe 1972), in the optimization of long high vowels under stress-timing (Donegan 1985); yet others in the interplay of system internal facts and the functional considerations contingent on the communicative needs of the speakers (Martinet 1952).
In the present account, these questions, though recognized as important in their own right, are replaced with a more general one. The question asked here concerns the apparent historically observable increase in the likelihood of English vowels to undergo change. Rather than asking why a particular change took place, it asks whether it is possible to identify factors that may have together provided a fertile breeding ground for such changes. This can provide a more general understanding of what happened than either trying to pinpoint triggering events for individual changes or abandoning the question of causality altogether. When it is shown that a set of conditions was met for a continuous parade of vocalic shifts to happen, not finding a particular cause of an individual one becomes more palatable. The wide discrepancies among the different attempts at solving the actuation problem, which differ not only in their conclusion but, first and foremost, in their assumptions about where the trigger for the change should even be looked for, might suggest that these questions should be abandoned altogether, and it may well be that discovering a trigger, or a set of triggers, for each individual development might present insurmountable difficulty. However, once a more global mechanism is known, then not knowing the intricate details of its component parts can be foregone with greater ease. Also, the question of coherence of chain shifts is cast in a new light. Since it is found that preconditions for vowel shifts were put in place, the importance of whether or not vowels displace one another, be it by dragging or pulling, loses its importance. When vowels are likely to move, then a vowel leaving its place in the design space is likely to appear, if only to the analyst, as being implicated in the movement of another vowel. If the conditions for vowels to move are not there, then, first of all, the first vowel is not likely to move, which, vacuously, will not cause further displacements. The testing ground for this holistic explanation will be English historical phonology, with as focus on the initial stages of the Great Vowel Shift.
1.2Theoretical framework
The aforementioned research question is thought to be best pursued when placed within the framework of evolutionary linguistics. One important advantage of this perspective, which assumes that language is an evolutionary system consisting of replicators persisting through time by creating copies of themselves, is that it is capable of solving the teleology problem in language change. Just as the advent of the evolutionary paradigm in biology made reference to a designer of the observable purposefulness apparent in all domains of the natural world redundant, so is the evolutionary approach able to account for the perceived purposefulness or design behind language without recourse to any designer responsible for it. Many functional accounts of language change have been accused of being, implicitly or explicitly, teleological, by resting upon goals which give direction to language change. If achieving goals were to be a legitimate mechanism for language change, then either linguistic systems or the users of those systems would have to be assumed to be aware of the goals which they want to attain as well as have means of fulfilling them. This is obviously untenable with reference to linguistic systems, as no-one would claim that these can wish anything. And individual speakers, though they certainly have wishes and desires, are definitely not able to foresee the possible consequences of whatever changes they might be capable of introducing into their language, which would be a prerequisite of them shaping long-term developments. With regard to the Great Vowel Shift, the reference to the goal of avoiding mergers as a reflection of the communicative needs of the speakers, the way Martinet (1952) did it, for example, would cast speakers in the role of designers, arriving at the chain shift, with its overall apparent pattern as a best response to the danger of losing lexical contrasts. The very fact that the change took some two hundred years to complete, however, points to the untenability of the agentive role of speakers in shaping the change. This situation, i.e. the presence of design without a designer, is strongly analogous to that in biological evolution.
In order to draw on the findings of the research into sound structure, which extends for well over a century, and to be able to make explicit assumptions about the synchronic organization of these patterns in relevant stages in the development of the English phonological system, a formal phonological framework is adopted. Optimality Theory (OT) has been chosen, because it provides a systematic formalism, which enables explicit presentation of the proposal put forth here. Additionally, there are some obvious similarities between evolutionary linguistics and OT, in that both frameworks involve constraints selecting among variants. Therefore, the formal apparatus of OT might lend itself more easily to the expression of arguments made from the evolutionary standpoint than formalizations of other frameworks might. Furthermore, OT incorporates functional motivations into grammar. The framework can be seen as functional in its original version of Prince and Smolensky ([1993] 2002), in that it enables encoding functional considerations directly into grammar as constraints , but it is even more functional in its “phonetically driven phonology” strand (cf. Hayes, Kirchner & Steriade 2004), which seeks to make explicit how functional restrictions enter grammars (Hayes 1996), including the role of perception in contrasts (Flemming 2004). Functional motivations for sound structure need to be expressible in an evolutionary account. For those reasons, and despite the differences between the generative and evolutionary conceptions of language and language change that will transpire throughout this book, the formalism developed in OT is used here. At the same time, insights regarding vocalic changes (Donegan 1978) and the relationship between rhythm and vowels (Donegan and Stampe 1983; Donegan 1993) that stem from research in Natural Phonology are also relied on. While different in letter, the interpretation of those developments from the standpoint of Natural Phonology can be seen as similar in spirit and therefore possible to incorporate into an evolutionary, replicator based framework.
