Jones Charles. A History of English Phonology

Routledge, 1989. — 331 p. — (Longman Linguistics Library). — ISBN: 9780582291560, 058204054X, 0582291569.This is an attempt to view historical phonological change as an ongoing, recurrent process. The author sees like events occurring at all periods, a phenomenon which he considers is disguised by too great a reliance upon certain characteristics of the scholarly tradition. Thus he argues that those innovations arrived at by speakers of the English language many years ago are not in principle unlike those that can be seen to be happening today. Phonological mutations are, on the whole, not to be regarded as unique, novel, once only events. Speakers appear to present to speech sound materials, a limited set of evaluative and decoding perceptions, together with what would seem to be a finite number of innovation producing stratagems in response to their interpretation. It is stressed that this interpretation may itself be a direct product of the kinds of data selected for presentation in traditional handbooks and Jones notes the fact that phonological change is often "messy" and responsive to a highly tuned ability to perceive fine phonetic detail of a type which, by definition, rarely has the opportunity to surface in historical data sources.Acknowledgements
Dedication
Aims, methods and model
Aims
Method
Model
The Early English period: the beginnings to the thirteenth century
The nature of the data
Vowel lengthening processes in Old English
Compensatory lengthening
Lengthenings in more general fricative contexts
Stressed vowel lengthening in nasal sonorant contexts
Lengthening in nasal and non-nasal sonorant contexts: Late Old English homorganic lengthening
The reconstruction of vowel length
The date of the homorganic lengthening process
Diphthongization processes in Old English
Old English Breaking
Breaking of long stressed vowels
Causes of this diphthongization in pre[x], [r], [l] contexts
Did this diphthongization ever really happen?
Exceptions to the Breaking process
Breaking in other fricative contexts
Monophthongization processes: Late Old English developments to Breaking-produced diphthongs
The instability of contextually derived alternations
Monophthongization and raising as a unified process
Middle English monophthongization processes
The Middle English development of the Old English [eo] diphthong
Special Kentish developments: syllabicity shifting
Vowel harmony processes in Old English
Backness/labial harmony two: Old English Back Mutation or Back Umlaut
Palatal/frontness vowel harmony: Old English i-umlaut
The nature of palatal vowel harmony in Old English
The Middle English period: the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries
The nature of the data
Vowel lengthening processes in Middle English
Open syllable lengthening in other languages
Lengthening and lowering as a unified process
Some further thoughts on open syllable lengthening
‘Exceptions’ to open syllable lengthening
Middle English open syllable lengthening as a vowel harmony process
Middle English open syllable lengthening and homorganic clusters
Vowel length and vowel raising: the Middle English vowel shift
The first English vowel shift
The Middle English vowel shift
The irregular application of palatalization/labialization
Diphthongization processes in Middle English: Middle English Breaking
Middle English Breaking in voiceless velar fricative environments: diphthongization of back mid vowels
Middle English Breaking in voiced fricative contexts: Middle English [j] Breaking
Diphthongization by [w] vocalization
Middle English Breaking in the sonorant consonant [r] and [l] environment
Middle English Breaking in other sonorant and fricative environments
Other Breaking stratagems: bi-continuant cluster busting
Syllable shapes and their phonetic consequences
Syllable contact points
Stratagems for achieving ambisyllabicity
‘Shuffling’ the linear sequence of segments in syllables: metathesis
The sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries
The nature of the data
Vowel length and vowel shifting: the English vowel shift
Possible motivations for such ‘large scale’ processes
Vowel shifts as independent phonetic events
Vowel diphthongizations and lengthenings: Breaking contexts and vocalizations
More Breaking stratagems: bi-continuant cluster busting again
Monophthongization processes
[au] and [ai] diphthongs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
Middle English [au] diphthong developments
Other [au] developments
Middle English [aei] diphthong developments
Syllable shapes and their phonetic consequences
[h] 'dropping' and insertion
Nasals at syllable interface
The eighteenth century to the present day
The nature of the data
Vowel length and vowel shifting: the English vowel shift
Vowel shifts and mergers
Merger avoiding stratagems
Diphthongization processes: vowel shifts and diphthongization
Long [ee] mid vowel alternants: a case study of a modern dialect
Vocalization and Breaking
[r] effacement and vocalization
Syllable shapes and their phonetic consequences: [r] at syllable interface
Monophthongization processes: monophthongization and merger