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Exploring Middle English (mor-)phonotactics: the case of word-final /nd/

Paper · 2009 · Nikolaus Ritt

Summary

Ritt uses morphonotactic theory, developed by Dressler and Dziubalska-Kołaczyk from ideas of Trubetzkoy, to study how phonology and morphology shaped each other in the history of English. The case is the word-final cluster /nd/. In Old English this cluster appeared only inside lexical roots, as in hand or land. In Middle English, schwa loss also produced it in past tense and participle forms of verbs whose stems end in /n/, so that EME /ʤoinəd/ became LME /dʒoind/. Many morphologically complex forms thus came to sound like simple ones. The theory predicts that languages prefer to keep lexical clusters and morphologically produced clusters apart, so the author looks for a reaction to this change. He finds one in Early Middle English Homorganic Lengthening. Before /nd/, only high vowels lengthened (bind became /biːnd/, while hand stayed short). Few weak verbs ended in /iːn/ or /uːn/, but many ended in long non-high vowels. Leaving short non-high vowels unlengthened therefore kept rhyme shape a reliable clue to whether a form was complex. The paper argues that morphology can steer how a sound change is carried out.

Key points

  • Final two-consonant clusters fall on a scale from exclusively phonotactic (/ŋk/ in ink, /mp/ in lamp), through mixed cases (/ts/, /ks/, /nd/), to exclusively morphonotactic (/md/ in seem+ed, /ɡz/ in egg+s). Mixed clusters are placed by how often they occur inside roots versus across boundaries (Figure 1).
  • Perception-based preferences should weigh more heavily on lexical clusters than on morphologically produced ones. Final /d/ in hand-type words is known to be unstable, and the paper cites Labov 1972 for this.
  • Weak verbs whose stems end in long non-high vowels (e.g. clean, mean, moan, groan, wane) were numerous, some of them frequent. Verbs in /iːn/ or /uːn/ (e.g. minen, pinen, brunen) were rare.
  • Figure 4 gives a decision path for /nd/ forms based on syllable count, syllable weight and vowel height. It separates simple forms (hand, bind) from complex ones (moned, cristend).
  • Two objections are addressed:
    • Teleology, an objection raised e.g. by Lass, is answered with a variationist account: speakers may have rejected lengthened variants such as /lɔːnd/ because the rhyme sounded like a past-tense form.
    • Publication year: the extracted text gives the citation as Selim 16 (2009), not 2019.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Each final segment string can be placed on a scale by how often it occurs inside stems versus across a morpheme boundary, rather than labelled simply "suffix" or "not suffix".
  • I2. A small cascade of shape cues (number of syllables, syllable weight, vowel height) can decide whether a form is morphologically complex, even when the final cluster itself is ambiguous.
  • I3. Ambiguity is judged by token frequency: a homophony risk matters only if the competing complex forms are actually common.
  • I4. Pressure to keep lexical and derived forms distinct can explain why a general change applied only in some contexts.
  • I5. A teleological-looking explanation is restated as selection among variants: forms that sound misleading are disfavoured by speakers.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tokens): The lemmatizer could store this ratio for endings like -nd, -ts or -ks. When guessing the analysis of an unknown word, it could then state how likely a boundary is.
  • I2 (tokens): A transparent rule cascade of this kind could flag possible past-tense forms among out-of-vocabulary words, with each decision step logged for explanation.
  • I3 (learn): Repair rules and silver-data filters could be scored by how many frequent tokens they would make ambiguous, not by the count of possible collisions.
  • I4 (learn): When an induced repair rule fires in only some contexts, Mova could test whether the gaps are where the rule would merge a lexical form with an inflected one. This gives a principled negative control for the rule.
  • I5 (back): The generator could check candidate surface forms and drop those whose shape suggests the wrong morphological structure, so that the original graph is easier to recover from the output.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPsychology · 798 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 463 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 159 works

Cite

Cite as Nikolaus Ritt. 2009. Exploring Middle English (mor-)phonotactics: the case of word-final /nd/. SELIM 16.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.17811/selim.16.2009.65-89

@inproceedings{ritt2009exploring,
  title = {{Exploring Middle English (mor-)phonotactics: the case of word-final /nd/}},
  author = {Nikolaus Ritt},
  booktitle = {SELIM 16},
  year = {2009},
  doi = {10.17811/selim.16.2009.65-89},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.16.2009.65-89}
}

References

27 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  27. Received 03 Sep 2010; revision received 19 Oct 2010; accepted 26 Nov 2010 • Selim 16 (2009) find

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