A Study On The Reduced Vowel Of Early English And Its Related Phenomena In Lexical Phonology

The thesis is a diachronic research on the Early English reduced vowel and its related phonological phenomena in Generative Phonology. This vowel appeared in Late Old English, gained the phonemic status in Middle English and vanished in the late Middle English. The so-called Early English is the term for the period from Old English to Middle English. This reduced vowel plays a key role in the evolution of English phonology and morphology. Firstly, its appearance symbolizes the evolution of Old English into Middle English. On the one hand, the reduced vowel was responsible for the loss of thematic vowel and the leveling of vowel contrast in the inflectional affixes. On the other hand, it caused a series of phonological rules to become opaque, which called for reanalysis of the phonological representation. Secondly, this reduced vowel was related to the changes of vowel length in the stressed syllable of Middle English. The significance of this research lies in the following aspects:firstly, it contributes to the exploration of how phonological changes influence morphology; secondly, it is helps to understand the formation and evolution of reduced vowel in Germanic languages; thirdly, it makes contribution to testifying whether sound change is teleological.Lexical Phonology (Kiparsky1985) is chosen as the theoretical tool in this thesis. The analysis of the syllabic and metrical structures in Early English refers to the syllabic theory (Hayes1987,1989) and the metrical theory (Hayes1995).It is found that the lexical strata of Old English and Middle English are defined by two groups of prefixes. One group can cause main stress shift (affix Ⅰ), while the other cannot (affix Ⅱ). The first stratum of the lexicon, as defined by affix Ⅰ, is cyclic, while the second stratum, as defined by affix Ⅱ, is non-cyclic. The type of metrical foot and the assigning rules are different in every stratum. The syllabic trochee is assigned in first strata, while the moraic trochee is formed in the second stratum. In the lexicon of Middle English, the stress patterns are diversified, which is the main difference between Middle English and Old English lexicon, while the pattern of native words remain unchanged and in dominant status.It is found that the UR of reduced vowel in Early English is an empty vowel, which has only root node and super laryngeal node but has not place node and any terminal constituents,and a mora is connected with root node. The vowel is only defined by [+sonorant,-consonantal]. The loss of reduced vowel takes place on two prosodic layers:segmental and moraic.With the aid of the Corpus of Language Atlas of Early Middle English, the loss of the reduced vowel is surveyed. The progress of vowel loss can be divided into two stages. Stage I-Early Middle English (12th-14thC):The suffixes with the phonological form/-(?)/is lost, and this process was not constrained by the prosodic structure of stem; the loss of reduced vowel in the stem is constrained by the prosodic structure of stem-the one at the end of heavy stem is lost. The loss of reduced vowel took place in the second lexical strata. Stage Ⅱ--Late Middle English (14th-16th C): The reduced vowel in the final position of light stem began to lose, which took place in the first lexical stratum.In Middle English the changes of vowel length in stressed syllable are: Homorganic Lengthening, Shortening before Consonant Cluster and Open Syllable Lengthening. It is found that such changes were the byproduct of vowel reduction. That is, the cause was the loss of mora of the reduced vowel, and such changes happened in the second lexical stratum. Homorganic Lengthening was triggered in the case that the "nasal+stop" cluster which was de-linked from the syllable node and placed as appendix, could not affect the weight of the preceding stressed syllable, as a result the short vowel in this syllable is lengthened. Open Syllable Lengthening was triggered in the case that the mora of the reduced vowel was deleted, so the syllable of this vowel became moraless and extrametrical, which caused lengthening of the short vowel in the preceding stressed syllable. Both of the lengthening processes were triggered by the binary requirement of moaic trochee, and both were compensatory lengthening.Shortening before Consonant Cluster was triggered in the case that the mora of the reduced vowel in the suffix/-C(?)/was deleted and the consonant of suffix caused re-syllabification. Then the long vowel before consonant cluster was shortened because, in Middle English lexicon, three was the maximal number of mora for a syllable. In addition, there is another phonological process which frequently coexists with Shortening before Consonant Cluster-Obstruent Devoicing before Sonorant. The context to trigger the devoicing process is that the dental consonant of past tense suffix is linked with the third mora of a syllable and preceded by a sonorant which is linked with the second mora of the same syllable. In Late Middle English, these two processes were promoted into the first lexical stratum.