Was Middle English a templatic language

Abstract

Late Old English (OE) and Middle English (ME) up until approximately the fourteenth century is a period characterised by a number of sound changes that have presented phonologists working in various frameworks, ranging from possibly the first all-encompassing Neogrammarian attempt by Luick (1914) to the contemporary Optimality Theoretic approach (e.g. Bermudez-Otero 1998), to devise a complete picture for what appears to have been a series of interrelated quantitative changes. Between these two ‘extreme’ points of reference, various SPE-type of analyses have been presented in the past (see 1.1). The issue was also taken up by Trubetzkoy (1939) and Murray (2000), for example, arguing for syllable cut prosody. More recently, the interest has also been revived in the framework of Natural Phonology as presented in Ritt (1994), for example, from whom the short-hand terminology to be used has been adopted. The principle of mora-preservation, foot structure (and closely connected to it, the so-called Germanic foot) and the like have been argued for (Dresher & Lahiri 1991, Lahiri & Fikkert 1999, etc.). Open syllable lengthening and trisyllabic shortening coupled with analogy, to be discussed shortly, have also been resorted to as a means of explaining the somewhat irregular behaviour of open syllable lengthening (Lahiri & Dresher 1999). These changes, in a rather non-chronological fashion, include MEOSL (the topic of this paper), TRISH (trisyllabic shortening), SHOCC (shortening before consonant clusters) and HOL (homorganic lengthening). Some of these issues have been tackled in Starcevic (2006) where the possibility of an analysis couched in terms of CVCV phonology is sketched out. A somewhat revised version will be presented in what follows.