|
COPYRIGHT 2002 Adam Mickiewicz University Press
ABSTRACT
Metathesis, a specific phonological development consisting in an alteration within the sequence of sounds in a word was usually materialised in the development of English as a shift of a prevocalic consonant to a postvocalic position or vice versa. The change affected various classes of words: nouns (OE brid> bird), adjectives (OE beorht > brigt 'bright', or verbs (OE irnan > rinnan 'run', etc.) This type of change, especially frequent in Northumbrian Old English, soon spread to other areas of England, showing a pattern typical of lexical diffusion. The paper concentrates on the metathesis of the liquid [r] and the adjacent vowel in the early periods of English. While only a very limited number of words with Old English metathesis survive into Modem English, those with Middle English metathesis have proved to be much more stable, retaining the metathetic form until Present-day English. The evidence of the available corpora, especially the OED, confirms the hypothesis of the change being rather abrupt than gra dual.
1. Metathesis
On the level of phonology, metathesis consists in an alteration within the sequence of sounds which seems to be a reflection of "performance errors" (cf Crystal 1980). In other words, it is a transposition of sounds and/or letters in a word (OCEL). Sometimes classified as belonging to the category of the slips of the tongue, metathesis is found to be a type of sound change especially common in child language. Erroneous metathetic sequences of sounds also develop in adult language, but their rise is governed by principles different from those responsible for errors in the language of children (cf Drachman 1978).
Hogg (1977) distinguishes three kinds of metathesis, of which two can be traced in English. The first is labelled as "sporadic" (e.g. [sp] > [ps]; wasp wapse) and as such is not rule-governed, the other, "regular", is best represented by the transposition of [r] and a vowel. In Germanic, metatheses, including r-metathesis, belong to the earliest processes and are present in each language belonging to that family. The transposition of a postvocalic r-sound to the prevocalic position is also attested in other Indo-European languages, including Slavic (cf Proto-Slavic *orsti > Russ. rosti 'grow'; Keyser 1975).
In English, the process is represented by the two basic modifications: (1) change of positions by a vowel and an adjacent consonant and (2) a mutual replacement of two items in a consonant cluster. In the former, prevocalic [r] moves to the position after the following vowel, especially when that vowel stands before [n] or [s], and, at a later date, before [d] in Late Northumbrian (cf PGmc * rinnan > WS irnan 'run', PGmc * brunna- > OE burna 'bourn', ONhb bird/WS brid 'bird', etc.). Alternatively, the liquid [r] after a vowel is moved before that vowel, the latter change being frequent in late Old Northumbrian when the vowel stands directly before the cluster [xt], as exemplified by ONhb wrybta from wyrhta (cf WGmc *wurhtjo- 'wright').
The other type of metathesis is a purely consonantal development in which items in a cluster exchange their positions. This again can be exemplified by two kinds of shift. The first affects the group [s] + a stop (cf WS ascian [ski > axian [ks] 'ask' or aesp > aeps, but also woeps > woesp 'wasp'), while the other is responsible for a change of places of a fricative ([f, 0, s]) plus the liquid [1]. Much more rare is the exchange of the elements in the clusters [sm, gn, kn, ns].
The present brief study will be only concerned with the former type, i.e. the metathesis of [r] and an adjacent vowel. Its aim is to adduce evidence when and how r-metathesis spread in Middle English. Another goal is to determine whether r-metathesis deserves to be assigned the status of a full-fledged phonological rule. Modem phonology postulates a systematic operation of a phonological change in a specified period of time. Sooner or later such a change affects all words containing an appropriate context.
2. Mechanisms of metathesis in English
The transposition of [r] and the vowel is by far the most frequent type of metathetic change in English. The effects of r-metathesis are found in the earliest Anglo-Saxon literature, throughout Medieval English, and also in the New English period. Like certain other consonantal changes, including assimilation, r-metathesis in Old English shows a number of distinct stages. According to Stanley (1952/53), the principle of rule ordering relevant to various phonological changes requires that metathesis in the earliest period of the history of English should be assigned to as many as four chronological stages, the first and the last in Anglian, the second (highly controversial) apparently in all dialects, and the third confined to West Saxon. Whether the details of such division are correct or not, Stanley's complicated scheme shows that metathesis cannot be treated as a change uniform chronologically and geographically.
Also, an explanation of the process as a mere changing of places by the liquid and the vowel, i.e.:
1) (a) VC > CV
(b) CV > VC
has been found less than satisfactory. Still, as a change which can only be explained in terms of abruptness hypothesis (cf. McMahon 1994: 49), the above simple pattern of the change became readily accepted by the confessors of generative phonology. As a reaction to (1) an alternative theory holds that what is regarded as an abrupt process of metathesis involves in fact a gradual change, i.e. an insertion of a vowel before [r] followed by a deletion of the vowel after [r] (cf. Hogg 1977, Blevins and Garrett 1998),...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
