Linguistic Change And The Great Vowel Shift In English

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.

This thorough analysis of documented Middle English spelling establishes when and where long-vowel change took place.

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Erfurt (Sprachwissenschaft), course: Regionale Varietäten, language: English, abstract: Every language changes over time. Due to historical, political and social events, like population shifts or movements, a language develops and becomes versatile, as intralinguistic variations emerge between different regions and dialects. One of the most important changes in the English language, which appeared especially in the south of England during the 15th to 18th centuries, was a Chain Shift, the so-called Great Vowel Shift.[INT1] A Chain Shift is “a change in the position of two phonemes in which one moves away from an original position that is occupied by the other.”(Labov 1994: 118) The linguist William Labov classifies three principles, which are applicable to all the Chain Shifts: Principle I: long vowels rise (as in the Great Vowel Shift) Principle II: short vowels fall Principle IIa: the nuclei of upgliding diphthongs fall Principle III: back vowels move to the front (Labov 1994:116)

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.

This book covers the historical development of the English phonological system from its earliest reconstructed and recorded forms to its most recent variations.

This volume provides a comprehensive account of Early Modern English, organized by linguistic level. The volume not only presents detailed outlines of the traditional language levels, it also explores key questions and debates, such as do-periphrasis, the Great Vowel Shift, pronouns and relativization, literary language (including the language of Shakespeare), and sociolinguistics, including contact and standardization.

Through his analysis of selected major developments in the history of English, Jeremy Smith argues that the history of the language can only be understood from a dynamic perspective. He proposes that internal linguistic mechanisms for language change cannot be meaningfully explained in isolation or without reference to external linguistic factors. Smith provides the reader with an accessible synthesis of recent developments in English historical linguistics. His book: Looks at the theory and methodology of linguistic historiography . Considers the major changes in writing systems, pronunciation and grammar. Provides examples of these changes, such as the standardisation of spellings and accent and the origins of the Great Vowel Shift Focuses on the origins of two non-standard varieties; eighteenth century Scots and twentieth century British Black English.This book makes fascinating reading for students of English Historical linguistics, and is an original, important and above all, lively contribution to the field.