중세영어 이중모음의 목록 변화

The Inventory Changes of Diphthongs in Middle English

The goals of this study are to analyze the inventory changes of diphthongs during the period of Middle English (ME) within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT)(Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004, McCarthy & Prince 1993, 1995, among others) and to show that an OT-theoretic analysis allows us to present a unified account of the inventory changes of diphthongs in ME. A comparison of the inventories of ME diphthongs in the literature on ME shows that 8 to 13 diphthongs in early ME are reduced to 7 diphthongs in late ME. In this study, it is assumed that 11 diphthongs in early ME are reduced to 7 diphthongs. Two kinds of OT-theoretic analysis are proposed in this study. One of them is an analysis that depends on the interaction of the markedness constraints such as *eɪ, *ɛɪ, *eʊ, *oʊ and the faithfulness constraints. The other is the one that introduces the notion of optimality of diphthongs, which is represented by a series of constraints such as MINDIS=1, MINDIS=2 and so on proposed in this study. Both analyses allow us to unify lost diphthongs as well as the diphthongs present in the late ME inventory under the same hierarchy of the proposed constraints. However, the latter seems to be superior to the former in that the former analysis cannot account for why [eɪ, ɛɪ, eʊ, oʊ] are not allowed in ME, while the latter can.