Verb Contraction in the West Saxon Dialect of Old English: An Optimality Theory Account

The phenomena of verb contraction in the West Saxon dialect of Old English has been described in many grammars of the language. However, most of these use a traditional rule-based analysis of the sound changes which occur. This thesis re-analyzes the data in terms of Optimality Theory (OT), which uses a system of constraint ranking to account for sound changes. The advantage of using OT is that it offers a single ranking to explain sound changes that would require separate rules and ordering in a more traditional analysis. Section 1 introduces the motivation for approaching this data from OT. Section 2 outlines relevant grammatical features of Old English, and the West Saxon dialect in particular. Section 3 applies OT to the data itself. The data is organized according to the final consonant of the verb stem in order to allow a process of analysis that builds a constraint ranking able to account for the changes in all the verbs under consideration, including vowel deletion, assimilation, dissimilation, and simplification of consonant clusters. Section 4 discusses the theoretical contribution of this study and suggests related areas in which the analysis could be further applied.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts (MA)

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Montana

Year

2007

Author dc:creator

• Mix, Melinda

• assimilation
• dissimilation
• OCP
• vowel deletion

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/1168

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarworks.umt.edu:etd-2187