Lexical Phonology and the History of English

This book analyzes some differences among English, Scottish and American accents of English, and shows how they developed and why they have their current form. Although the revised version of lexical phonology presented here is intended to describe present-day patterns, it can also show how historical sound changes gave rise to these patterns.

List of contents

Acknowledgements; 1. The rôle of history; 2. Constraining the model: current controversies in lexical phonology; 3. Applying the constraints: the Modern English Vowel Shift Rule; 4. Synchrony, diachrony and lexical phonology: the Scottish Vowel Length Rule; 5. Dialect differentiation in lexical phonology: the unwelcome effects of underspecification; 6. English /r/; Bibliography; Index.

Summary

This book has two main goals: the re-establishment of a rule-based phonology as a viable alternative to current non-derivational models and the rehabilitation of historical evidence as a focus of phonological theory.

Product details

• Authors: April Mcmahon, April M. S. McMahon
• Assisted by: S. R. Anderson (Editor), J. Bresnan (Editor)
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.12.2015
• EAN: 9780521472807
• ISBN: 978-0-521-47280-7
• No. of pages: 322
• Dimensions: 157 mm x 235 mm x 24 mm
• Weight: 675 g
• Series: Cambridge Studies in Linguisti; Cambridge Studies in Linguisti
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative linguistics