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Old English vowels: Diachrony, privativity, and phonological representations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Thomas C. Purnell ,
Eric Raimy  and
Joseph Salmons
Thomas C. Purnell
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin – Madison
Eric Raimy*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin – Madison
Joseph Salmons*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin – Madison
*
Purnell & Raimy, Department of English, 600 North Park Street, University of Wisconsin – Madison, Madison, WI 53706, [tcpurnell@wisc.edu], [raimy@wisc.edu]
Language Sciences, 1220 Linden Drive, University of Wisconsin – Madison, Madison, WI 53706, [jsalmons@wisc.edu]
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Abstract

Old English underwent diachronic change in its vowel inventory between its predecessor West Germanic and Middle English. We provide an analysis of the addition and loss of vowels in Old English from the perspective of modified contrastive specification (Dresher et al. 1994). Three main themes emerge from our analysis: (i) the phonological representation of contrast in the vowels in English has remained remarkably stable for over a thousand years, (ii) the proposed analysis improves upon and supersedes similar analyses proposed in Dresher 2015 and Purnell & Raimy 2015, and (iii) the adoption of privative features provides an improved representationally based understanding of phonological activity, feature geometry, and how phonology reflects general cognitive features of memory.

Keywords

contrastdiachronydistinctive featuresprivative featuresOld Englishsuccessive division algorithmphonological activity

Information

Type
Research Report
Information
Language , Volume 95 , Issue 4 , December 2019 , pp. e447 - e473
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 Linguistic Society of America

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