On Thursday, March 21, Elan Dresher will present a FLAUT talk entitled “Changes in Syllable Quantity and Stress in Middle and Early Modern English.” This event will take place at 7pm, in the Department of Linguistics lounge.
Abstract:
This talk will consider some changes in syllable quantity and the rules for main stress that had considerable effects on the prosody of English. The causes of these changes have been much debated, and touch on fundamental issues in diachronic and synchronic linguistics. The first set of changes altered the quantity (vowel length) of stressed syllables in the Middle English period, and pose the question: Why aren’t there more singular~plural pairs like staff~staves in Present Day English? At a more general level, these changes have led some to ask: are languages viruses that colonize children? The second set of changes involve the rules of main stress: why did native speakers of English adopt the Latin stress rule? Were these changes in progress already at the time of Chaucer (c. 1400), or did they occur considerably later? All the changes discussed in this talk show the relevance of the synchronic grammar and the role of language learners in accounting for phonological change.
No comments:
Post a Comment