Non-finality Effects in Middle English Stress: Regularisation or Emerging Grammar?
2008
The present paper looks at stress-shifting processes which
transformed penultimate stress (pilgrima:Ze, "pilgrimage") into
word-initial stress (pilgrima(:)Z) in Middle English. The change
also involved final-vowel deletion. The contact between the ME
stress system and that derived from French loans seems to be
resolved via regularisation in the direction of the borrowing
language. However, we claim that this process of stress shifting
already points towards changes in the English grammar of stress.
We provide an Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky,
1993/2004; McCarthy & Prince, 1993) analysis of this
phenomenon, suggesting that stress regularisation results from a
conspiracy of both paradigmatic and grammatical forces. Not only
does the resulting pattern (pilgrima(:)Z) comply with the wordinitial
stress dominant pattern in OE and ME, but also it is less
marked from a phonological viewpoint. This suggests an
emerging grammatical role of the constraint NONFINALITY in
ME grammar.
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