Great Vowel Shift

About: Great Vowel Shift is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 87 publications have been published within this topic receiving 2667 citations. The topic is also known as: Tudor vowel shift.

Accents of English

Abstract: Accents of English is about the way English is pronounced by different people in different places. Volume 1 provides a synthesizing introduction, which shows how accents vary not only geographically, but also with social class, formality, sex and age; and in volumes 2 and 3 the author examines in greater depth the various accents used by people who speak English as their mother tongue: the accents of the regions of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland (volume 2), and of the USA, Canada, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Black Africa and the Far East (volume 3). Each volume can be read independently, and together they form a major scholarly survey, of considerable originality, which not only includes descriptions of hitherto neglected accents, but also examines the implications for phonological theory. Readers will find the answers to many questions: Who makes 'good' rhyme with 'mood'? Which accents have no voiced sibilants? How is a Canadian accent different from an American one, a New Zealand one from an Australian one, a Jamaican one from a Barbadian one? What are the historical reasons for British-American pronunciation differences? What sound changes are currently in progress in New York, in London, in Edinburgh? Dr Wells his written principally for students of linguistics, phonetics and English language, but the motivated general reader will also find the study both fascinating and rewarding.

Early Modern English

Abstract: Varieties of early modern English attitudes to English phonology morphology syntax the expanding vocabulary changes of meaning.

English Words: A Linguistic Introduction

Abstract: Preface Acknowledgments IPA Transcription Key 1 What is a word? 11 Explaining word in words 12 Language is a secret decoder ring 13 Wordhood: the whole kit and caboodle 14 Two kinds of words 15 The anatomy of a listeme 16 What don't you have to learn when you're learning a word? 17 A scientific approach to language 2 Sound and fury: English phonology 21 English spelling and English pronunciation 22 The voice box 23 The building blocks of words I: Consonants in the IPA 24 Building blocks II: Vowels and the IPA 25 Families of sounds and Grimm's law: a case in point 3 Phonological words: Calling all Scrabble players! 31 Guessing at words: The Scrabble problem 32 Building Blocks III: The Syllable 33 Phonotactic restrictions on English syllables 34 From a stream of sound into words: Speech perception 35 Syllables, rhythm, and stress 36 Using stress to parse the speech stream into words 37 Misparsing the speech stream, mondegreens and allophones 38 Allophony 39 What we know about phonological words 4 Where do words come from? 41 Getting new listemes 42 When do we have a new word? 43 New words by 'mistake': back-formations and folk etymologies 44 New words by economizing: clippings 45 Extreme economizing: acronyms and abbreviations 46 Building new words by putting listemes together: affixation and compounding 47 Compounding clips and mixing it up: Blends 48 New listemes via meaning change 49 But are these words really new? 5 Pre- and suf-fix-es: Engl-ish Morph-o-log-y 51 Listemes 52 Making up words 53 Affixal syntax: Who's my neighbor?, Part I 54 Affixal phonology: Who's my neighbor? Part II 55 Allomorphy 56 Closed-class and open-class morphemes: Reprise 6 Morphological idiosyncrasies 61 Different listemes, same meaning! Irregular suffixes 62 Root irregulars 63 Linguistic paleontology: fossils of older forms 64 Why some but not others? 65 How do kids figure it out? 66 Representing complex suffixal restrictions 67 Keeping Irregulars: Semantic clues to morphological classes 68 Irregulars III: Suppletion 69 Keeping Irregulars: Producing words on the fly 610 Productivity, blocking and Bushisms 7 Lexical semantics: The structure of meaning, the meaning of structure 71 Function meaning vs Content meaning 72 Entailment 73 Function words and their meanings 74 Content words and their meanings 75 Relationships and Argument Structure: Meaning and grammar 76 Argument Structure 77 Derivational morphology and argument structure 78 Subtleties of argument structure 79 Function vs content meanings: the showdown 710 How do we learn all that? 8 Children learning words 81 How do children learn the meanings of words? 82 Learning words for middle-sized observables 83 When the basics fail 84 Morphological and syntactic clues 85 Learning words for non-observables 86 Syntactic frames, theta roles and event structure 87 Agent-Patient Protoroles 88 Functional listemes interacting with content listemes 89 Simple co-occurrence? Or actual composition? 810 Yes, but where do the words come from in the first place? 9 Accidents of history: English in flux 91 Linguistic change, and lots of it 92 Layers of vocabulary and accidents of history 93 A brief history of England, as relevant to the English vocabulary 94 55 BC to 600 AD : How the English came to England 95 600-900 AD The English and the Vikings 96 1066-1200: Norman Rule 97 1200-1450: Anglicization of the Normans 98 1450-1600 The English Renaissance 99 1600 -1750: Restoration, Expansion 910 1750-modern day 911 The rise of prescriptivism: How to really speak good 912 English orthography: The Roman alphabet, the quill pen, the printing press and the Great Vowel Shift 913 Summary List of Works Consulted Glossary Words Consulted Index

English phonology and phonological theory : synchronic and diachronic studies

Abstract: Preface Part I. Vowel Contrasts and their Deployment in English: 'Length' and 'System': 1. On the 'two kinds of vowels' in English 2. Rules, metarules, and the shape of the Great Vowel Shift 3. The Great Vowel Shift and its aftermath in the North Midlands Part II. Expanding the Database: The Yield of Comparative Method: 4. What kind of vowel was Middle English /a/ and what really happened to it? 5. Middle English /c/ in New York City English Part III. Issues in General theory: Features, Rules and Classes: 6. On the phonological characterization of [?] and [h] 7. Complementary modes of description in phonology Epilogue.

Optimality Theory and Language Change

Abstract: List of contributors Acknowledgements Part I Optimality Theory and Language Change: Overview and Theoretical Issues: D.Eric Holt / Remarks on Optimatility Theory and language change.- Paul Boersma / The odds of eternal optimization in Optimality Theory.- Randall Gess / On re-ranking and explanatory adequacy in a constraint-based theory of phonological change.- Ricardo Bermudez-Otero & Richard M. Hogg / The actuation problem in Optimality Theory: Phonologization, rule inversion and rule loss.- April McMahon / When history doesn't repeat itself: Optimality Theory and implausible sound changes.- Charles Reiss / Language change without constraint reranking.- Part II Case Studies of Phonological Change: Donka Minkova & Robert Stockwell / English vowel shifts and 'optimal' diphthongs: Is there a logical link?.- Viola Miglio & Bruce Moren / Merger avoidance and lexical reconstruction: An OT model of the Great Vowel Shift.- Haike Jacobs / The emergence of quantitiy-sensitivity in Latin: Secondary stress, lambic Shortening and theorectical implications for 'mixed' stress systems.- Conxita Lleo / Some interactions between word, foot and syllable structure in the history of the Spanish language.- D.Eric Holt / The emergence of palatal sonorants and alternating diphthongs in Old Spanish.- Jaye Padgett / The emergence of contrastive palatalization in Russian.- Part III Case Studies of Syntactic Change: Benjamin Slade / How to rank constraints: Constraint conflict, grammatical competition and the rise of periphrastic do.- Larry LaFond / Historical changes in verb-second and null subjects from Old to Modern French.- Bibliography on Optimality Theory and language change / Randall Gess.- References.- Indices: Names, Languages, Constraints, Terms.