Linguistics 300, F09, Assignment 1

Background

English is one of the Germanic languages, and word stress in English originally followed the Germanic stress rule, according to which word stress (basically) falls on the first syllable. But following the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, French became the language of government and administration for more than two centuries, and many French words entered the English language. According to the French stress rule, word stress (basically) falls on the last syllable. Assuming that learners tended to be exposed to French (loan)words after the critical period of phonological acquisition, we might expect them to have trouble pronouncing them; specifically, they might assign stress to such words - occasionally, or even often - according to their native stress rule learned instead of the foreign one. For instance, they might hear a-'zure but produce 'a-zure. If such errors occurred among enough speakers and over a long enough time, we should be able to track the results of this imperfect acquisition in the changing patterns of word stress over time in French loanwords. In the first half of the class, we will investigate whether there is evidence in the historical record for the change just described.

It is important to understand that the focus of the project is not a description of the French loanwords themselves. Rather, the focus is on deducing from the changing stress patterns the mental processes of the speakers acquiring those words.

In order to study the change, we will need to know several pieces of information:

For the first two items, we will rely on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), without a doubt the world's most splendid lexicographic achievement. In addition to listing the meaning of words, the OED gives their etymological source and their pronunciation (including their modern stress).

In general, however, the OED does not report information about word stress in earlier stages about English. We will therefore exploit the phonological information embodied in verse texts. Scanning such texts and taking into account information concerning rhyme will allow us to determine - at least in many cases - how speakers stressed the words used in the verses. We will focus on the verse texts of Chaucer and Shakespeare, since they are plentiful and good online concordances for them exist.

Assignment

The first assignment in connection with the word stress project is intended to familiarize you with the stress rules that will be of interest to us and with the online resources that we will mining for the empirical basis of the work.