What is a merger, and can it be reversed? : the origin, status and reversal of the 'NURSE-NORTH merger' in Tyneside English

This thesis examines the apparent merger of the NURSE and NORTH lexical sets in Tyneside English. In order to determine its origin and status, whether reversal of the merger has taken place, and whether Wells (1982) is correct in his assertion that no hypercorrection has occurred, I examine two kinds of data: (1) traditional dialect phonetic transcriptions; and (2) an auditory and acoustic phonetic analysis of a socially stratified corpus of Tyneside English, the Tyneside Linguistic Survey (Pellowe et a/. 1972). Analysis of the first data-set suggests that there was indeed a merger of these two lexical sets. However, the sampling and elicitation methods employed mean that the real distribution of the merger within the speech community and within the speech of the informants themselves remains unknown. The second data-set is key, therefore, in that it reveals a range of speaker types, from those with complete merger to those with completely distinct NURSE and NORTH lexical sets. Additionally, there is evidence that hypercorrection of the NORTH lexical set has occurred, but on a narrower phonetic scale than Wells (1982) originally envisaged. In light of these divergent data and accounts of other'mergers', it is argued in this thesis that mergers are, in reality, diverse and complex sociolinguistic phenomena, so that questions such as Is Xa merger? and Has mergerXbeen reversed? only make sense when we know what kind of 'merger' X really was. Since the 'NURSE-NORTH Merger' is limited linguistically, geographically and socially, it is argued here that its reversal has been achieved with minimal disruption to the linguistic system in a way that would not be possible for other more widespread and entrenched mergers. Furthermore, it is suggested that it has been reversed in a phonetically gradual manner, such that obvious hypercorrection has been avoided. This possibility of phonetically gradual but lexically specific reversals of merger raises important questions for models of sound change.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceUniversity of Newcastle Upon TyneGBUnited Kingdo

Phonotactics, graphotactics and contrast:The history of Scots dental fricative spellings

The spelling conventions for dental fricatives in Anglic languages (Scots and English) have a rich and complex history. However, the various – often competing – graphemic representations (<þ>, <ð>, <y> and <th>, among others) eventually settled on one digraph, <th>, for all contemporary varieties, irrespective of the phonemic distinction between /ð/ and /θ/. This single representation is odd among the languages’ fricatives, which tend to use contrasting graphemes (cf. <f> vs <v> and <s> vs <z>) to represent contrastive voicing, a sound pattern that emerged nearly a millennium ago. Close examinations of the scribal practices for English in the late medieval period, however, have shown that northern texts had begun to develop precisely this type of distinction for dental fricatives as well. Here /ð/ was predominantly represented by <y> and /θ/ by <th> (Jordan 1925; Benskin 1982). In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, this ‘Northern System’ collapsed, due to the northward spread of a London-based convention using exclusively <th> (Stenroos 2004). This article uses a rich body of corpus evidence for fifteenth-century Scots to show that, north of the North, the phonemic distinction was more clearly mirrored by spelling conventions than in any contemporary variety of English. Indeed, our data for Older Scots local documents (1375–1500) show a pattern where <y> progressively spreads into voiced contexts, while <th> recedes into voiceless ones. This system is traced back to the Old English positional preferences for <þ> and <ð> via subsequent changes in phonology, graphemic repertoire and letter shapes. An independent medieval Scots spelling norm is seen to emerge as part of a developing, proto-standard orthographic system, only to be cut short in the sixteenth century by top-down anglicisation processes

Charting the rise and demise of a phonotactically motivated change in Scots

Although Old English [f] and [v] are represented unambiguously in Older Scots orthography by <f> and <v> (or <u>) in initial and morpheme-internal position, in morpheme-final position <f> and <v>/<u> appear to be used interchangeably for both of these Old English sounds. As a result, there is often a mismatch between the spellings and the etymologically expected consonant. This paper explores these spellings using a substantial database of Older Scots texts, which have been grapho-phonologically parsed as part of the From Inglis to Scots (FITS) project. Three explanations are explored for this apparent mismatch: (1) it was a spelling-only change; (2) there was a near merger of /f/ and /v/ in Older Scots; (3) final [v] devoiced in (pre-)Older Scots but this has subsequently been reversed. A close analysis of the data suggests that the Old English phonotactic constraint against final voiced fricatives survived into the pre-Literary Scots period, leading to automatic devoicing of any fricative that appeared in word-final position (a version of Hypothesis 3), and this, interacting with final schwa loss, gave rise to the complex patterns of variation we see in the Older Scots data. Thus, the devoicing of [v] in final position was not just a phonetically natural sound change, but also one driven by a pre-existing phonotactic constraint in the language. This paper provides evidence for the active role of phonotactic constraints in the development of sound changes, suggesting that phonotactic constraints are not necessarily at the mercy of the changes which conflict with them, but can be involved in the direction of sound change themselves

Visualising pre-standard spelling practice:Understanding the interchange of ‹ch(t)› and ‹th(t)› in Older Scots

No abstract available