모음의 역사적 변천과정에서 나타난 융합과 분리에 관한 연구

Merge and Split in the Historical Development of English Vowels: focusing on AFB and its consequence

The aim I wish to achieve in this article is to provide a new perspective on the occurrence of the Anglo-Frisian Brightening and its consequence, [a]-restoration, in early Old English. I assume that there is a strong possibility that those two apparently separate phenomena are closely related, the former triggering the latter. I take as a starting point the assumption that adding /ae/ to the vowel inventory before the AFB contributes to the symmetry of the system, which is well-motivated by phonological representation in terms of Gorecka(1989)'s Site-Articulator model. As a reaction to AFB, [a]-restoration is quite expected to take place in the present analysis. The most economical way to restore the /a/ is to obtain [+back] from any adjacent back vowel, which has been characterized as a case of umlaut in the literature. During my argumentation, unlike the previous treatments of these phenomena, I set a high value on elucidating the correlation between AFB and [a]-restoration. It turns out that the former is followed by the latter from the interaction of relevant universal constraints. The crucial points of my analysis will be compared in detail with those of Moon(2012) so that the fundamental feature of my claims could be well delivered.