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Was Middle English a templatic language?

Paper · 2012 · Attila Starčević

Summary

The paper revisits Middle English Open Syllable Lengthening (MEOSL), the change that lengthened Old English short stressed vowels in open syllables. Earlier accounts treat it either as simple lengthening or as compensatory, mora-preserving lengthening triggered by schwa. Both struggle with the data. Starčević uses rhymes attested in Barbour's Bruce and Cursor Mundi to show that the affected vowels were also lowered, not merely lengthened. He also points out that schwa was still pronounced after MEOSL, which undermines the idea that schwa's mora was transferred to the stressed vowel. He then examines the formulations of Minkova (1982) and Kim (1993) and identifies their gaps. Drawing on CVCV phonology, he proposes that MEOSL was a templatic change rooted in Old English. A CVCV template caused the stressed vowel's melody to spread into an empty CV slot, but only when a following melodically empty vowel (schwa) licensed it. This explains why lengthening always occurs before schwa and never before -ow or -y, as in belly and shadow. Remaining exceptions are attributed to dialect mixture and Romance stress influence.

Key points

  • MEOSL began in the North in the twelfth century and reached the South in the thirteenth. Non-high vowels changed first, and /i/ and /u/ followed later in fewer words.
  • Rhyme evidence shows lowering alongside lengthening, for example gome rhyming with dōme. The paper also corrects Lieber's stere–were pair by tracing it to the Kentish reflex of OE y.
  • Arguments against Minkova (1982):
    • Schwa survived into Chaucer's time, so a word like boren would gain a mora rather than conserve one.
    • Middle High German shows similar lengthening while keeping schwa.
  • Kim's (1993) rule ties lengthening to the weakening of the second vowel to schwa rather than to its loss. However, it wrongly allows any number of following consonants.
  • Further applications of the template idea:
    • Applying the template from the right edge may explain shortening in sorry and meadow.
    • Dialect timing may explain cradle versus saddle and beacon versus herring.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Rhymes serve as an independent witness to vowel quality, separate from spelling, and they expose a change that spelling hides.
  • I2. A causal story is rejected because its timeline is inconsistent: schwa cannot donate its mora while still being pronounced.
  • I3. The trigger is located precisely in vowel weakening, not deletion, which accounts for words with -ig/-y that never lengthened.
  • I4. Apparent exceptions are explained as a mixture of dialect sources that adopted the change at different times, rather than dismissed as noise.
  • I5. The author audits a frequently cited example and finds it supports the claim only after its dialect origin is fixed.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (learn): Silver data could be validated with a witness that uses a different signal than the parsers. This would catch errors that all similar witnesses share.
  • I2 (world): Event-order reasoning could check whether a claimed cause actually precedes or coincides with its effect, and flag explanations that violate that order.
  • I3 (tokens): Morphological rules should be conditioned on the reduced surface form of a suffix rather than its mere presence, so that lookalike endings are not over-applied.
  • I4 (tree): When treebanks or UD dialect conversions disagree, the conflict could be traced to the source convention before being treated as an annotation error.
  • I5 (learn): Gold examples used in evaluation could be periodically re-audited for provenance, since a mislabeled showcase item can silently prop up a wrong rule.

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 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 works

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

Cite

Cite as Attila Starčević. 2012. Was Middle English a templatic language?. Anuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca "Julio de Urquijo" 46.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{starcevic2012was,
  title = {{Was Middle English a templatic language?}},
  author = {Attila Starčević},
  booktitle = {Anuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca "Julio de Urquijo" 46},
  year = {2012},
  doi = {10.1387/asju.12627},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1387/asju.12627}
}

References

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