Old English Short Vowels before Nasals: An Optimality-Theoretic Analysis

This study aims to explore the patterns of short stressed vowels before nasals in early OE. Nasals exert their influence in many phonological processes such as vowel harmony in Primitive Germanic (Prim. Gmc) and i-Umlaut in Primitive Old English (pre-OE), and dialectal/date variations in early OE. In vowel harmony, nasals prevent high vowels from harmonizing with the vowels of the following syllable, and they also raise the preceding mid and low vowels to high and mid vowels, respectively, regardless of the height of the following vowel. In i-Umlaut, nasals bring about raising in addition to fronting. Such nasal effects on the short vowels in early OE have rarely received a theoretical analysis. In this study, I attempted to analyze the nasal effects on the short vowels in OE within the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993, McCarthy & Prince 1995, McCarthy 1997, 1998). The Keep constraints which are phonetically and typologically motivated are proposed to explain the nasal effects on the preceding vowels. They interact with various kinds of constraints: markedness constraints, faithfulness constraints, mainly, subtypes of Ident-IO and Prec constraint. It has been shown that not only the seemingly discrete phenomena but also seemingly exceptional cases can be easily captured and incorporated by the same hierarchy of the constraints proposed in this study.