Contrastive Feature Hierarchies in Old English Diachronic Phonology

Abstract

This article looks at the origins and uses of contrastive hierarchies in Old English diachronic phonology, with a focus on the development of West Germanic vowel systems. I begin with a rather enigmatic remark in Richard Hogg's A grammar of Old English (1992), and attempt to trace its provenance. We will find that the trail leads back to analyses by some prominent scholars that make use of contrastive feature hierarchies. However, these analyses often appear without context or supporting framework. I will attempt to provide the missing framework and historical context for these analyses, while showing their value for understanding the development of phonological systems. I will show that behind these apparently isolated analyses there is a substantial theoretical edifice that once held a central role in synchronic as well as diachronic phonological theory, and which is still capable of providing insights into the workings of phonology.

Morris Halle (1923–2018)

“…hierarchies, which is prominent in Halle 1959, is absent in his subsequent work, and indeed largely missing in the phonological literature of the next forty years. Dresher (2009Dresher ( , 2018 has now revived it and made a good case for its relevance to understanding sound change. A more poignant example is Halle's disavowal of probabilistic and information-theoretic approaches, in which he had invested a great deal of effort, as having been a waste of time (Halle 1975).…”

Getting ready for primetime: Paths to acquiring substance-free phonology

“…In light of the arguments presented in the previous section, we suggest the latter. This is also relevant to phonetic feature-learning approaches discussed below, which will need to permit the phonology to “override” the phonetics in these cases, as Dresher (2018) puts it. Indeed, Sapir (1925: 47–48) already noted that “it is most important to emphasize the fact, strange but indubitable, that a pattern alignment does not need to correspond exactly to the more obvious phonetic one.” 8…”

“…Few phonological feature-learning approaches have been explicated in sufficient detail to test their predictions, but one way of distinguishing between approaches such as Dresher's (2014, 2018) and Odden's (2022, in this issue) lies in cases where non-contrastive features appear to be needed in the representation. Dresher (2014: 166) states that “it is the learners’ task to arrive at a set of features that account for the contrasts in the lexical inventory (the phonemes) of their language.” As we understand Odden's approach, active features are first learned on the basis of phonological alternations, and non-active but contrastive features are filled in later.…”

Nordic umlaut, contrastive features and stratal phonology

“…The distribution of front umlaut in the vocabulary is quite different, not only when the North and West Germanic branches are compared but likewise between more closely related daughters that both descend from the same main branch (Kiparsky 2009:12-16, 45-48). Hence, insofar as the relative chronology is concerned, the majority view today is that this sound change must have progressed in parallel, after the Northwest Germanic protolanguage broke up (Kiparsky 2009, Dresher 2018: §3.5, note 23, Schalin 2018:54, 58 with references). Against this background, it continues to be justified to pursue reconstruction of the Nordic umlauts internally, as is done in this paper.…”