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Main page » Non-Fiction » Science literature » Linguistics » Lexical Phonology and the History of English


Lexical Phonology and the History of English

 

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. Although Lexical Phonology includes several constraints, such as the Derived Environment Condition and Structure Preservation, intended to reduce abstractness, previous versions have not typically exploited these fully. The model of Lexical Phonology presented here imposes the Derived Environment Condition strictly; introduces a new constraint on the shape of underlying representations; excludes underspecification; and suggests an integration of Lexical Phonology with articulatory phonology. Together, these innovations ensure a substantially more concrete phonology. The constrained model is tested against a number of well-known processes of English, Scottish and American accents, including the Vowel Shift Rule, the Scottish Vowel Length Rule, and [r]-Insertion, and draws interesting istinctions between what is derivable by rule and what is not. Not only can this Lexical Phonology model the development of low-level variation to phonological rules, and ultimately to dialect differentiation in the underlying representations; but a knowledge of history also makes apparently arbitrary synchronic processes quite natural. In short the phonological past and present explain one another.



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Tags: phonological, focus, evidence, theory, Lexical, History, English, Phonology, historical