Lee, Sechang. 2015. Revisiting the Great Vowel Shift as a consequence of Drag Chain. English Language and Linguistics 21.2, 21-40. The trigger of the Great Vowel Shift(GVS, henceforth) remains as one of the outstanding and theoretically important issues in the history of English. Under the assumption that language users can have intuitions about the ways in which the vowels are spatially organized in relationship to another, two interpretations have traditionally been available. The high vowels diphthongize first, leaving ‘empty slots’, and half-close vowels move up into the empty slots, which in turn entails the next shifts, and so on. Alternatively, beginning from below, each vowel pushes the next above one up. Since the high vowels have nowhere else to go, they diphthongize. The theoretical issue here is that essentially, those movements are supposed to occur context free, i.e., they occur without any phonetic motivation. In this article I propose to show that certain instability in terms of constraint conflict in the system came to trigger the whole process of the GVS. By the time the GVS began, every (long) vowel in the system came under the pressure of maximizing sonority at the expense of tonality in the sense of Particle Phonology (Shane 1984). Once the problem has been put in these terms, it will be shown that the solution is all but self-evident: a drag chain type of reaction will be set up in the vowel space.
(0)
(0)