Linguistics 300, F12, Assignment 5

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, and many French words entered the English language. According to the French stress rule, word stress (basically) falls on the last syllable. Assuming that Middle English learners tended to be exposed to French (loan)words after the critical period for phonological acquisition, we would expect them to have had trouble with producing the (to them) ungrammatical stress patterns. Our expectation is based on contemporary evidence. For instance, German speakers are known to pronounce Ex.'cel according to the Germanic stress rule, yielding 'Ex.cel (like a.xle). Similarly, the pronunciation of Polish loanwords with antepenultimate stress (hi.po.'po.ta.ma, ma.te.'ma.ti.ka) is currently undergoing a change in keeping with the native Polish stress rule, according to which words receive penultimate stress (hi.po.po.'ta.ma, ma.te.ma.'ti.ka). So Middle English speakers, too, might have occasionally - or even often - assigned stress to French loanwords according to their native stress rule instead of the foreign one. For instance, instead of a.'zure, they might have produced '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 learning in the changing patterns of word stress in French loanwords over time. We will investigate whether there is evidence in the historical record for the change just described.

It is conventional to speak of the words as undergoing a change in pronunciation, and we sometimes follow this convention ourselves (as in our description of Polish above, though not of German). However, it is important to understand that our focus is not on the words themselves, but on the (possibly changing) mental representations and processes of the speakers who use the 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. Exploiting information in such texts concerning meter and 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 be mining for information.