Vowel-Shifting in the English Language von Kamil Kaźmierski | An Evolutionary Account | ISBN 9783110366099

Vowel-Shifting in the English Language

An Evolutionary Account

von Kamil Kaźmierski
Buchcover Vowel-Shifting in the English Language | Kamil Kaźmierski | EAN 9783110366099 | ISBN 3-11-036609-6 | ISBN 978-3-11-036609-9

Vowel-Shifting in the English Language

An Evolutionary Account

von Kamil Kaźmierski

English has long been suspected to be a vowel-shifting language. This hypothesis, often only adumbrated in previous work, is closely investigated in this book. Framed within a novel framework combining evolutionary linguistics and Optimality Theory, the account proposed here argues that the replacement of duration by quality as the primary cue to signaling vowel oppositions has resulted in the ‘shiftiness’ of many post-medieval English varieties.