phonological shifts

8/6/2019 Phonological Shifts

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Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction, 5th edition, Chapter 7: Phonological shifts, 1

Phonological shifts

The causes and even the details of the Great English Vowel Shift still remain unclear. In

fact, the causes of phonological shift in general are not well understood. A possible

motivation in some cases appears to involve the phonemic system itself, where the

notion of phonological space plays a role. As in the case of ease of articulation,

phonological space is difficult to define precisely. For our purposes and focusing on

vowels only, we can consider the vowel quadrangle (a schematicization of the oral

cavity) as the phonological space that vowels must occupy. Although the vowel

systems of languages can be arranged in various ways (see Chapter 8), there is a

tendency for languages to maximize the use of space in the quadrangle. Accordingly, if

a language has only three vowels, they will likely be [i], [a], and [o] or [u], not (for

example) [i], [e], []. Similarly, if a language has five vowels, they will be distributedthroughout the phonological space typically as [i], [e], [a], [o], [u] rather than [u], [],

[o], [], [a] for example (see Figure 1).

Languages with seven (or more) vowels (e.g. English at the starting point of the

Great English Vowel Shift) often undergo diphthongization. This can be seen as a -reaction to the overcrowding of the phonological space, since the effect of the -

diphthongization of a pair of vowels is to reduce a seven-vowel system to a five-vowel

system. (Think of the two diphthongs as not infringing on the space of the simple

vowels.)

Overcrowding appears to have resulted in diphthongization in many languages,

including Old High German and Spanish (see Table 1). The diphthongization in these

two languages differs from that of the Great English Vowel Shift in two ways. The mid

vowels and not the high vowels are affected and different sets of diphthongs result.

Nevertheless, in terms of phonological space, all these cases of diphthongization

achieve the same result: namely, a reduction of the overcrowded seven-vowel system.


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Although the Great English Vowel Shift was complicated by other developments,

diphthongization resulting from overcrowding appears to have been a contributing

factor.

Sound change and rule ordering

In describing language change, it is often crucial to identify the relative chronology, or

times at which different changes have occurred. Three important changes in the

history of English can be given as the following (somewhat simplified) rules in Figure 2.

These changes have played an important role in the evolution of English plural

forms such as hooves(versus hoof) and wolves(versus wolf). Of the possible orderings

of these three rules, only one will derive the contemporary pronunciation from the

earlier (Old English) phonemic form. Two of the possible orderings are given in Table

2.


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If we assume hypothesis A with the ordering voicing, syncope, and assimilation, we can

account for the [vz] in the modern pronunciation of a word such as wolves. By contrast,

the ordering proposed in hypothesis B would not account for the present

pronunciation.

phonological shifts

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