pISSN: 1598-3293
영어영문학연구, Vol.59 no.1 (2017)
pp.251~270
Diachronic Development of English Word-Initial Consonant Clusters kn- and gn- : A Constraint-Based Analysis
This article presents a constraint-based analysis of the reduction of the word-initial consonant clusters /kn-, gn-/ to /n-/. We explore scenarios on the diachronic development of the consonant clusters kn- and gn- in Kökeritz (1945), Dobson (1968), and Lass (1999). On the basis of a modified version of Lass’s (1999) scenario, we analyze the phonetic changes from a constraint-based perspective (Optimality Theory: Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004). Unlike previous analyses using a very specific constraint *σ[kn, our analysis deals with /gn-/ as well as /kn-/ in a unified way, proposing a more general constraint *σ[SN. In addition, this study reflects the direction of sound change agreed upon, which is from faithfulness >> well-formedness (markedness) to well-formedness (markedness) >> faithfulness. That is, our analysis involves the promotion of the markedness constraint *σ[SN and the demotion of the faithfulness constraint Max-IO. In the analysis, we adopt the floating constraint model (Nagy and Reynolds 1997), in which constraints move and their ranking changes, and Rank-Ordering Model of Eval (Coetzee 2006), which accounts for phonetic variation.
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