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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:MONTANA/oai:etd.lib.umt.edu:etd-08312007-211250 |
| Date | 19 September 2007 |
| Creators | Mix, Melinda |
| Contributors | Mizuki Miyashita, Gary Bevington, Ashby Kinch |
| Publisher | The University of Montana |
| Source Sets | University of Montana Missoula |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.umt.edu/theses/available/etd-08312007-211250/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Montana or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
Page generated in 0.0021 seconds