An Account of the Asymmetry in Old English Breaking

An Account of the Asymmetry in Old English Breaking

  Old English Breaking presents a few intriguing asymmetric patterns, depending on the nature of the front vowels and the conditioning consonants that follow. One of them is that Old English /x/triggers breaking in isolation, whereas Old English /r, l/ require a following consonant in order to trigger breaking. Though recognized, this specific asymmetry has not been formally accounted for in previous works. We show that a modified constriction-based theory of representation (Clements & Hume 1995), which incorporates the temporal relation and the multi-layered structure for articulatorily complex segments such as /x, r, l/, provides an analysis that can predict the asymmetric pattern at hand in Old English Breaking. We also present a possible optimality-theoretic account of the asymmetry, employing phonetically-driven constraints and faithfulness constraints.