강세음절 단모음 목록의 역사적 변화: 고대영어에서 중세영어까지

Historical Changes in the Inventory of Stressed Short Vowels: From Old English to Middle English

The main goals of this study are to investigate the inventories of stressed short vowels in Old English (OE) and Middle English (ME) and to analyze their structural characteristics and historical changes utilizing Dispersion Theory (Flemming 1995a, 1995b, 2002, 2004, 2006) formalized within the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004; McCarthy and Prince 1993, 1995, among others). This study attempts to explore why the vowel inventories of the two periods were as they were and to find patterns which dominate their historical change. This study has shown that the inventory structure of stressed short vowels in each period is shaped primarily by the interaction of three types of constraints: MINDIST constraints, MAXIMIZE CONTRASTS, and NPV which requires effort minimization; MAXIMIZE CONTRAST and NPV are interleaved in the hierarchy of MINDIST constraints, each of which is specified with multiple phonetic dimensions. Furthermore, the constraint-based analysis proposed in this study provides a coherent and unified account of the stressed short vowel inventories in both OE and ME.