The History of Final Vowels in English: The Sound of Muting [Reprint 2012 ed.] 9783110889512, 9783110127638

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The History of Final Vowels in English

Topics in English Linguistics 4 Editors

Jan Svartvik Herman Wekker

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

The History of Final Vowels in English The Sound of Muting Donka Minkova

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

1991

M o u t o n de Gruyter (formerly M o u t o n , The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.

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Minkova, D o n k a , 1944 — The history of final vowels in English : the sound of muting / D o n k a Minkova. p. cm. — (Topics in English linguistics ; 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-89925-784-4 (alk. paper) 1. English language —Vowels. I. Title. II. Series. PE1157.M5 1991 42Γ.5 —dc20 · 91-28082 CIP

Die Deutsche Bibliothek

— Cataloging in Publication

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Minkova, Donka: The history of final vowels in English : the sound of muting / D o n k a Minkova. — Berlin ; New York : M o u t o n de Gruyter, 1991 (Topics in English linguistics ; 4) ISBN 3-11-012763-6 NE: G T

© Copyright 1991 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-1000 Berlin 30 All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. N o part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printing: Ratzlow-Druck, Berlin. Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

Contents Preface

ix

Chapter 1 Schwa in the history of English

1

1.1. 1.2. 1.3. 1.4.

Problems involved in the present study Forces at play in schwa loss Remarks on method Analytical procedures

Chapter 2 More background: Accounts of schwa loss 2.1. Choice of sources 2.2. Lorenz Morsbach (1896): Mittelenglische Grammatik 2.3. Karl Luick (1921-1940): Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache 2.4. Richard Jordan: (1934/1968) Handbuch der mittelenglischen Grammatik 2.5. Wilhelm Horn/Martin Lehnert (1954): Laut und Leben. Englische Lautgeschichte der neueren Zeit (1400 — 1950) 2.6. Karl Brunner (1962): Die englische Sprache, ihre geschichtliche Entwicklung. Vols. I, II 2.7. Joseph Wright and E. M. Wright (1923): An Elementary Middle English Grammar 2.8. Fernand Mossé (1949): Manuel de l'anglais du moyen âge 2.9. Jacek Fisiak (1970): A Short Grammar of Middle English 2.10. Peter Erdmann (1972): Tiefenphonologische Lautgeschichte der englischen Vokale 2.11. Summary Chapter 3 Textual evidence 3.1. Principles and methods specific to the study of schwa loss in Middle English 3.2. Types of evidence 3.3. Graphically marked morpho-syntactic loss of -e

1 2 3 10

15 15 16 20 23 24 24 25 26 27 27 28

35 35 37 45

vi

Contents

3.4. 3.5. 3.6. 3.7. 3.8.

Unetymological final -e Elision in hiatus Rhyme evidence Scribal errors, editorial corrections Graphically unmarked evidence

Chapter 4 Phonological aspects of schwa loss 4.1. 4.2. 4.3. 4.4. 4.5. 4.6.

The phonemic status of schwa in Middle English The Middle phonemic inventory Distribution Phonetic parameters. Distinctive features Phonological correlates of schwa loss Some consequences

Chapter 5 Morphological aspects of schwa loss 5.1. 5.2. 5.3. 5.4. 5.5. 5.6.

The morpho-syntactic functions of schwa The morphologization of schwa loss Classification and ranking of factors for schwa loss Syntactic correlates Extralinguistic factors Hierarchy of factors within individual word classes

Chapter 6 Early schwa deletion as a prosodie phenomenon 6.1. 6.2. 6.3. 6.4.

Early schwa loss data The shared properties of early schwa loss The rhythmic phrasing of early schwa deletion The Early Schwa Deletion Rule

55 62 69 71 75

87 87 91 104 106 109 114

125 125 133 134 140 146 149

155 155 158 159 162

Chapter 7 Schwa preservation in Late Middle English as a prosodie phenomenon

171

7.1. Final -e in weak adjectival inflexions 7.2. The weak adjectives in Chaucer 7.3. The weak adjectives in non-Chaucerian Late Middle English

171 172 173

Contents

7.4. 7.5. 7.6. 7.7. 7.8.

Accounts of adjectival schwa preservation The rhythmic nature of final -e The metrical structure of adjectival phrases The proposal reviewed: objections Conclusion

vii

175 177 178 186 187

Bibliography

193

Index

217

Preface Schwa has always been the poor relation of the stressed vowels in English historical phonology. The academic searchlights have been directed on the developments of the vowels in stressed position. Most studies in the field do make some reference to the changes of unstressed vowels, yet the supposedly predictable genesis and unidirectional fate of the ubiquitous schwa-type vowels have attracted very little attention. Seen in a wider context, however, the reduction of unstressed vowels to schwa and its subsequent loss in final position has had a more p r o f o u n d effect on the phonology, prosody, and grammar of the language than any individual qualitative or quantitative change of the stressed vowels. This book is an attempt to bring together traditional philological records and knowledge of the ways and means of schwa loss and reexamine them in relation to the entire language system. The first three chapters of the book deal with the data base: how we know that unstressed vowels in final position were reduced and lost, what methods and resources can be used in this context, how we classify and interpret the various types of textual evidence. Separating out poetic from non-poetic schwa loss, graphic f r o m inferred evidence, loss of nonmorphemic, root-final schwa f r o m loss of inflexional schwa, proves useful in establishing causes and consequences of the process on all levels. Chapter 4 addresses rarely asked questions a b o u t the synchronic status of schwa in Middle English. An examination of the evidence for phonemic identification of the unstressed vowel in final position suggests that in terms of traditional phonemic analysis schwa has always been part of the phonemic inventory of English. In Early Middle English there was a match between the underlying, or lexical, representation of schwa, and its surface realization. Instances of early deletion are analysed as postlexical rules operating first within a narrow set of environments, and later across the board in word final position. By the end of the Middle English period, after c. 1400, schwa is disallowed as an underlying segment in absolutely final position except in a peripheral subset of markedly foreign borrowings. Optional insertion rules operate in very specific lexical items and in some clearly defined prosodie contexts. Chapter 5 covers the morphological correlates of the change. In Middle English as many as eighteen different grammatical functions can be associated with the morpheme represented by in writing. This suggests that lack of morphological distinctiveness is a m a j o r factor in

χ

Preface

schwa loss in those word classes, such as the nouns and the verbs, in which schwa figures prominently in the inflexional paradigm. It is argued that the familiar generalized statements concerning the morphological attrition of schwa should be refined substantially by referring not to the lexicon as a whole, but to separate word classes. The causes and rate of loss in each class turn out to be different. The chapter offers a detailed hierarchization of individual factors and their potential importance in schwa loss for each word class. Chapters 6 and 7 introduce arguments from metrical phonology into the account of schwa loss. Schwa loss affected the language continuously for at least three centuries; it is impossible to get a clear and systematic notion of what items were subject to deletion at the peak of the change, around 1250 — 1350. However, if we look at the very early instances of deletion, as well as at the instances of late preservation of schwa, a clearer pattern emerges. Early schwa deletion can be defined in terms of a specific metrical foot structure — a definition which extends to later cases of deletion and eventually embraces all occurrences of word final loss. At the other end of the chronological span, Late Middle English, we find schwa surviving consistently only in one isolated syntactic context, the weak declension of etymologically monosyllabic adjectives. The motivation for the preservation is neither functional nor segmental; it can be read off the metrical structure of the constructions involved and can be seen as an instance of the principle of eurhythmy. Both chapters address schwa loss from a new perspective — the perspective of prosodie organization of language. Both chapters demonstrate that the operations of schwa loss should be constrained within two domains: the domain of the foot and the domain of the clitic group. The customary task of acknowledgements and thanks is not easy in the case of a study which draws on the achievements of traditional philological scholarship and on modern linguistic theory. Indebtedness is not quantifiable, and one paragraph will inevitably fall short of expressing my gratitude to all who have helped bring the project to this stage. Work on this book was done in three universities: Edinburgh, Sofia, and UCLA. The mixture of background can be my only excuse for the blend of philology and at least two kinds of linguistics I have used in my analysis. I acknowledge gratefully the generous assistance of the U C L A Senate Research Committee since 1985 for the final research and writing. Two great philologists and teachers, Professors Marco Minkoff and Maria Rancova, encouraged and supported me in my early steps in the profession. To their memory this book is gratefully dedicated. Among the many

Preface

xi

colleagues to whom I feel indebted I want to mention specially Roger Lass, Heinz Giegerich, John Anderson, Edmund Gussmann, Bruce Hayes; they have shown me how exciting and complicated historical phonology can be, though no study could do justice to their collective wisdom, nor should any of them be implicated in my blunders. My closest professional model and associate Robert Stockwell has tried in vain to teach me how to keep effusiveness and verbosity in check; to his salutary influence the readers owe the elimination of one third of the original bulk of the book. My sons Dimo and Lubo, the culprits solely and jointly responsible for all infelicities in the book, have shared me with schwa far too long — their only reward must be that no other teenager in the world would know what this weird word means. Finally, for years I have described my task to friends and colleagues as "everything you always wanted to know about schwa but were afraid to ask". What started out as a blind date with the topic developed into a relationship which has enriched me; I hope I have enriched it. More questions remain than have been asked or answered; this is only a beginning.

Chapter 1 Schwa in the history of English

1.1. Problems involved in the present study The relative significance of various factors, phonological, morphological, syntactic, sociolinguistic, and stylistic in relation to the causes and consequences of the loss of final schwa in English has remained an unresolved and controversial issue in the philological literature of the last 150 years. This study is an attempt to clarify some recalcitrant aspects of the change and offer a hypothesis defining schwa loss in terms of the more general linguistic properties of English, diachronically and synchronically. Provisionally, before going into the phonetic and terminological details in Chapter Four, I will use the term schwa to mean, vaguely, the unstressed, reduced, mid, central, murmured, indeterminate, colorless vowel, the usual sound of the first and last vowel of America, for which I use the IPA mid central vowel symbol [s]. Briefly, word-final schwa in English is generally assumed to have originated from neutralization of the oppositions between a number of distinctive and stable sounds occurring prior to and during the time span between the ninth and the eleventh centuries. Its subsequent history, i.e. between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries, is characterized by non-distinctiveness, instability, and progressive disappearance; by the second half of the fifteenth century the letter was no longer pronounced, except in a handful of recognizably foreign words. The spelling evidence for Old English (OE) suggests that the distance between the vowels /e/, /a/, /u/, and /o/ in unstressed syllables was fairly well preserved throughout the Classical period (excluding the /a/ and /o/ neutralization, and possibly other short vowel neutralizations before nasals). 1 After 950, in Late Old English (LOE) and in Early Middle English (EME) this difference was no longer maintained; the grapheme began to be used in all post-tonic syllables, no matter whether they belonged to basically monomorphem«: words, e.g. OE guma 'man', ME gume; OE wundor 'wonder', ME wunder, OE lufu 'love', ME luve; OE stede 'place', ME stede; or whether they were syllables functioning as inflexional morphemes, e.g. mac-ode 'made', ME makede, OE waer-on 'were', ME weren; OE hwal-as 'whales', ME whales; OE dag-um 'to the days', ME dagen; aris-αδ 'they rise', ME ariseth, OE scip-a 'of ships' ME shipe etc.^ The high vowels in some derivational affixes, especially the /i/, appear to have resisted the weakening; thus /i/ shows no evidence of reduction and typically survives in

2 Schwa in the history of English suffixes such as -ίξ, -ic, -isc, -ing; while -ung alternates with -ong. Morphemic identification is probably responsible for the consistent preservation of the unstressed vowel in words ending in -o(c)k: parrok, hassok, buttok, bullok. ^ There is no written documentation of reduction in a limited set of lexical items, which behave indiosyncratically most likely for reasons of association with a specific register (ME bishop, abbot) - no morphological justification can be found for the apparent persistence of the original vowel in their final syllables.

1.2. Forces at play in schwa loss Standard textbook descriptions of final vowel reduction in Late Old English and Early Middle English attribute the process, manifested by the adoption of spelling in post-tonic syllables to the following factors: (1) Phonetic changes in progress: phonetic reduction and its corollary - the neutralization of phonemic distinctions - resulting from the concentration of stress on the root syllable, leading to a series of important grammatical changes, and above all to a radical decrease in the number and loss of inflexions. (2) Morphological changes in progress; neutralization of the original differences between the inflexional morphemes of nouns, verbs, etc., renders these morphemes functionally deficient, and promotes the appearance of new means of expressing grammatical relations. This leads to redundancy and eventual loss of the final unstressed vowel in major class words. (3) Phonetic and morphological changes in progress simultaneously; in this view phonology and morphology are in a counterfeeding relationship: the absence of stress prominence renders inflectional morphemes nondistinctive phonologically, and therefore redundant functionally; loss due to the absence of function in some instances extends to cases where schwa is not a grammatical unit, contributing to the phonological spread of the change. Some variant of this compromise is the most frequently encountered description of the loss. I believe this to be the only correct account, yet it needs additional defense, expansion, and refinement. (4) In addition to the system-internal factors in (1) - (3), the developments of the post-tonic syllables in Middle English have been causally linked to the

Forces at play in schwa loss 3 extralinguistic factor of the existence of a large bilingual community in areas of the North and North East Midlands after the tenth century. This study surveys the evidence for the changes in post-tonic syllables in Middle English. In the light of this evidence I examine the plausibility of the views summarized in (1) - (4). There is little discussion in the philological literature of the phonological properties and behavior of /a/ in Middle English, its phonemic status, or its place and function within the prosodie system of the language. The last two chapters will address the issue of schwa loss in terms of the prosodie patterns and preferences of Early and Late Middle English.

1.3. Remarks on method Part of my task is purely descriptive: I will review and gather in one place textual information scattered or unavailable in the literature. This prompts the necessity of constructing a data-specific taxonomy. Once this has been accomplished, and an acceptable classification has emerged, I will reconsider the results in the light of independently formulated traditional and more recent theories and assumptions. Combining the philological with the linguistic approach holds the promise of new insights into the history of this important and underresearched issue. Providing explanations of language change has been the concern of most major schools, branches, currents in both philology and linguistics. I state briefly my indebtedness to the various hypotheses which may have direct bearing on the history of schwa. The background assumptions and the descriptive and analytical techniques I have used are self-selected and derived from the following contributions to the historical study of language:

1.3.1.

Neogrammarian

The notions of sound law and analogical change are crucial for the Neogrammarian model. In that framework sound change is characterized by a regularity which elevates it to the status of a "law". Phonological change is also understood to proceed mechanically, affecting all items exhibiting a particular phonetic configuration; it is presumed to be gradual and impervious to direct observation. The famous Neogrammarian identification of sound laws with universal natural laws has been questioned and rejected on the basis of the now obvious fact that the regularity of phonological change is never absolute. Post Neogrammarian

4 Schwa in the history of English studies have revealed intricate ties between sound change and morphology, syntax, and word formation - this now axiomatic contingency compromised the notion of "mechanical" sound change. The gradualness hypothesis, although it overlaps with our ideas of change through lexical diffusion, does not coincide with it, and leads to unacceptable notions of pervasiveness, and has been challenged on this and other scores. The same is true of the idea of "unobservability" of sound change, which was rendered obsolete by the excellent sociolinguistic studies of the last couple of decades. Schwa loss is clearly a phonetic process. From that point of view the principle of regularity supports the assumptions concerning the predictable relationship between lack of stress as the conditioning factor, and weakening and deletion of the final vowel. Under a magnifying glass, however, the detail of textual evidence reveals an uneven rate of disappearance of -e in Middle English, which suggests a morphological interference with the process of loss. Even this initial basic knowledge would preclude any attempts to formulate the change in terms of a Neogrammarian sound law. Analogy is another tenet of the Neogrammarian school. It is a principle which applies to the patterning of higher-than-the-phoneme units, i.e. it is most frequently appealed to in morphology, syntax, word formation. Analogy has the effect of counteracting phonological change. The extent to which this principle can be called upon to explain the causes and mechanisms of language change presents a complex and controversial problem and there is a vast body of literature on analogy. This model of accounting for language change has been used by scholars since the sixteenth century. The treatment of analogy in the Neogrammarian school allows it to be a strategy which "tends to become a terminological receptacle, devoid of explanatory power, a catchall for irregularities in the operations of 'regular' sound laws" (King 1969: 127), and therefore in more recent diachronic studies it has been overshadowed by newer proposals and only mentioned in conjunction with such proposals as a peripheral factor. Many instances of paradigmatic leveling unrelated to analogy have been quoted in support of the idea that this explanatory model should either be abandoned or resorted to only in very special cases (King 1969: 129-30). The related idea of proportionality, however, has had many proponents. Studies by Kuryfowicz (1947), Manczak (1980), Anttila (1977), etc. have attempted to formulate and explicate the "laws" and tendencies of analogy and have succeeded in eliminating some of the insidious vagueness discrediting this model. Analogy enters into the discussion of schwa deletion for two reasons. First, schwa loss is a thoroughgoing morphological change, and morphology is one of the language domains where analogy is agreed to be most powerful and most

Remarks on method 5 effective. Second, traditionally, sound change and analogy are seen as standing in a restorative relationship, i.e. "grammatical structures rendered opaque, or under the threat of being rendered opaque, by sound change are likely to be 'repaired' by analogical change" (Bynon 1977: 44). Yet, analogy is not necessarily only an antidote used to reintroduce order into a paradigm into which sound change has inducted lack of uniformity. At least partially, after the levelling of inflexions, the Middle English picture is one of sound change and analogy both working in the same direction - a situation unaccounted for by the standard Neogrammarian views of the interplay between sound change and analogy. ^

1.3.2. Functionalism Even if one accepts analogy as a valid and interesting model of language change, its explanatory power is confined to the spread of already existing forms; it obviously feeds on already existing forms and cannot create new forms of its own accord. Functionalist accounts, on the other hand, have been concerned with the actual origin of innovative linguistic forms. Scholars in this tradition, adopting the idea of language as a more or less rigid hierarchy of mutually dependent constituents, have contributed to the elucidation and understanding of the relations obtaining among the various linguistic units within the language system. The limitations of this approach are by now widely recognized (cf. Lass 1980a), yet it has been fruitful in stimulating further research and in prompting alternative hypotheses. In the history of schwa in English a certain degree of "functionality" has to be incorporated into the account of its phonemic development - useful and insightful notions such as that of phonemic contrasts and neutralization are functionalist, and they are central to the explication of the synchronic relations of -e in Middle English. Diachronic functionalism, the recourse to explanations of language change by invoking the metaphor of survival of the fittest, of linguistic units as healthy, or unhealthy, as superior or inferior in performing their duty, is more suspect. Language change does not proceed irrespective of, or in spite of, the needs of communication. The familiar adage "communication alone shapes language" (Martinet 1960: 191) is an alternative way of saying that language is first and foremost a social phenomenon. Considered in the narrow context of schwa loss, though, extreme functionalism would imply that if at any point in its history -e had been perceived as absolutely necessary, if its omission would have impaired the communicative value of the utterance, its ultimate loss without prophylaxis or further therapy would have been inconceivable. ^

6 Schwa in the history of English Another ramification of the functionalist model concerns the reliance on a statistically computed functional load of a unit, which is then assumed to be in some way explanatory in terms of the unit's proneness to various diachronic processes. In spite of the initial attractiveness of the idea of an empirically based explanatory strategy, its application encounters too many serious problems for it to be adopted without further comments or reservations. Functional load, ultimately a teleological concept, is measured by Prague School phonologists by the number and frequency of the minimal oppositions into which a given phoneme can participate, a procedure supposed to predict the diachronic stability or instability of a phoneme. This type of diagnostic runs into difficulties both with reference to the actual mechanics of computing functional load, and with reference to the interpretation of the results within a more general picture of the history of a language. How does one select the correct amount of linguistic material providing the necessary and sufficient context for the evaluation of the functional load of one phoneme? Does the idea apply to morphology and syntax as well as to phonology? Is it phonemes, allophones, or features that one measures the functional load of? These and other questions have prompted extensive criticism of the whole notion, cf. King (1967), Bynon (1977: 87-89), Lass (1980a: Chapter Three). I limit my "functionalist" discussion of -e to an evaluation of its phonemic and morphological status within the entire system of the language, and I agree from the start with the cautionary note that "it may be altogether inappropriate to look for a motivation of phonological change which is based on the structural status of phonological units" (Bynon 1977: 88). Another ramification of the structuralist model is the view that "the phonological evolution of a language may be seen as a continuous effort to maintain a state of balance between inertia on the one hand, and communicative needs on the other" (Bynon 1977: 89). Economy is a general linguistic "collective-psychological" factor which has been described as "basic in the analysis of the mechanism of language change" (Polivanov 1931: 54). It is common sense to assume that, especially in more relaxed and colloquial registers, speakers can take shortcuts, and their language would be subject to variability and change attributable to "inertia" or "human laziness". These notions can all too easily be confused with the now totally rejected idea of diachronic developments as instances of "deterioration". In any case, evoking "economy", in the sense of "shortcuts", and not as "deterioration", as anything more than a marginal phenomenon in historical linguistics is an extreme position which may be dangerously loaded in the context of a change which amounts to deletion, as is the

Remarks on method 7 case with schwa loss. The pitfalls of oversimplification are all too obvious; I will try and direct my analysis away from this type of "economy".

1.3.3. Rule-governed change Within the model of generative phonology linguistic change affects the set of rules according to which the grammar of a language is organized; therefore change is described in terms of loss or addition of rules, rule reordering or rule simplification, cf. King (1969), Kiparsky (1968, 1970). Originally in this framework the traditional processes of sound change and analogy were stated as rules affecting the speaker's competence.^ A huge body of studies in synchronic and historical linguistics have shown that both with reference to phonology and with reference to syntax surface, or performance phenomena must be given equally serious consideration. The development of the theory along these lines has resulted in what has been described as a rapprochement between the generativist and the traditional philological views, cf. the discussion in Bynon (1977: 145). Accumulation of diachronic data in phonology has confirmed the assumption that "the motivation of phonological changes depends rather on performancerelated targets ...than on purely formal considerations" (Bynon 1977: 138). The psychological reality and the analytical usefulness of the phoneme, initially regarded as uninteresting by the early generative phonologists, have regained legitimacy as minimal contrastive underlying units, albeit in the guise of "underlying segments". The surface attestations of underlying forms can be derived with the help of rules which operate on those forms. Stipulation of the conditions for the operation of the rules translates any difference between a postulated underlying form and its realization into a predictable, rule-governed change. Stability and pervasiveness of a particular type of innovative surface realization may suggest that there has been a reanalysis of the underlying linguistic "system". Little has been done in studies of schwa loss from this point of view; as a very preliminary outline of the problem one can say that during Middle English schwa loss was initially a phonologically and morphologically motivated rule. The spread of the rule caused reanalysis of the underlying structure of the language. By the end of the period a schwa whose sounding is guaranteed by e.g. the metrical pattern of a poetic piece, must be accounted for in terms of insertion by rule, rather than as a deletion.

8 Schwa in the history of English 1.3.4. Socially motivated change Language is a social phenomenon; it cannot be understood or described adequately, let alone "explained", without reference to the social context in which it functions. Sociolinguistic studies have contributed substantial insights into our comprehension of the mechanisms of language change, and of sound change in particular. Martinet's extreme position (1960: 188-189) that "only internal causality concerns the linguist" has long been shown to be too limited; the complete autonomy of the so called "internal" and "external" factors has also been rejected, see Vachek (1962), Avrorin (1975: 25-28),** Berezin and Golovin (1979: 189), Bynon (1977: Chapter Five). The extent to which the sociolinguistic parameters of a dead language can be established depends on the availability of texts representing various stylistic registers. Some marginal information can be gleaned from knowledge of the regional origin of a particular text, as well as from familiarity with the personal history of the author. Such information is not readily accessible for Middle English; in the absence of first hand comments and descriptions of change in progress by contemporaries, we have to be satisfied with very broad and possibly unilluminating observations on the "social" character of schwa loss. One would assume, for instance, that in its incipient stage schwa loss could have a phenomenon correlating with speech unaffected by familiarity with the spelling system, "uncontaminated" by education. Conversely, since the written form of the language never abandoned the symbol for schwa, one might speculate about the possibility of a period of time when pronouncing final schwas could have been a mark of a literate, highly conservative variety of English. One line of inquiry which can prompt interesting observations about the rate of the change in relation to the sociolinguistic background would be taking into account the register of the textual source, i.e. one would expect alliterative poetry to be more conservative than accentual-syllabic poetry, narrative type texts to be more advanced than nonnarrative texts. However, the balance and interplay between "internal" and "external" forces in language change in the case of schwa loss can be sought more profitably in the introduction of another parameter - outside linguistic influence.

1.3.5. Contact-induced, change Contact between languages, in the broadest sense of the word contact, is a noncontroversial source of language change. In a strict dichotomy of "external" vs. "internal" factors for language change language contact would fall under the

Remarks on method 9 former group.9 Evidence that linguistic developments can be generated by the contact between languages is most readily available in the sphere of vocabulary, but there is also abundant literature on the manner in which continuous exposure to and simultaneous use of two languages can influence a speaker's phonology, morphology, syntax. In the conditions of prolonged bilingualism on the British Isles, both Anglo-Scandinavian, and Anglo-Norman, one can expect some evidence of the varying rates of schwa loss depending on the linguistic situation of the area from which a given text originates. A direct influence from either Scandinavian or Norman French on the loss of -e in phonological terms cannot be postulated, since there is no parallel development in Scandinavian, and as for the French -e muet, it began to disappear from the end of words under certain conditions much later than it did in English. The morphological history of {-e} is universally assumed to have been influenced, at least to some extent, by the contact between the different languages spoken on the British Isles. More specifically, there is a long tradition of associating the disintegration of the inflexional system of English has to Anglo-Scandinavian bilingualism (Jespersen 1938 [1962]: §79; Ilyish 1973: §275 etc.). According to this widely accepted view absolute accuracy of the grammatical form is not essential in the process of communication because of the genetic relationship between the language of the settlers and the language used by the native population. The phonetic identity or similarity of the roots of words is taken as a catalyst, and in some studies, as a sufficient condition for basic understanding to take place between the speakers of English and the Scandinavian settlers. More recently, detailed research of creolization processes has provided a new framework within which the contact between Scandinavian and English can be described. Middle English has been analyzed in terms of a system which cannot be derived directly from its Anglo-Saxon predecessor (Fisiak 1977: 249). This new system, the Middle English interlanguage or creole (the two terms are used synonymously here), emerged under the decisive influence of Scandinavian. Poussa (1982: 83) summarizes the first stages in the development of (Chancery) English as follows: 866 918 1016 1016 1066 1066 14th c.

Old Mercian. Old Danish East Midland Creole Hybridization with Late West Saxon and Mercian Stabilization as spoken koiné in London and the Midlands Further Danish influence, hybridization with London dialect(s) French influence (mainly written, apart from lexis) English patriotic revival. Immigration to London from the Midlands.

10 Schwa in the history of English The earlier and familiar Jespersenian view, and the more recent, creolization account of the way in which contact with other languages affected the history of English are fully compatible. They both cover the attested dialectal distribution of morphological changes in Middle English; the creolization hypothesis, however, emphasizes processes which take place in the spoken form (Poussa 1982: 70), undoubtedly an important and neglected area of historical analysis. Stylistic considerations are also taken into account in the study of creóles. Creoles are generally characterized by loss of grammatical gender and simplification and loss of the grammatical inflexions; assuming the existence of a Middle English creole can help us sharpen our understanding of the very different behavior of -e in English and in the other Germanic languages given identical phonological conditions of reduced stress.

1.4. Analytical procedures The brief introductory notes in 2.1 on the major ways in which the origins and nature of language change have been approached in the literature, as well as their applicability to the Middle English material must be supplemented by an outline of concrete procedures of analysis. Once again my point of departure is fairly familiar. Important methodological principles for the study of language change were laid down in the classical study by Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968: 183188). I reproduce their Empirical Principles for the Theory of Language Change below: (1) Determine the set of possible changes and possible conditions for change (The Constraints Problem ). (2) Trace the ways in which the changing feature is embedded in the linguistics structure (The Embedding Problem [a]).^ (3) Consider all factors, "stimuli and constraints both from society and from the structure of language" which influence change in relation to one another (The Actuation Problem). Heterogeneity underlies change. An overall view of the process of change is best achieved through a multiplicity of approaches. (186).^ This cursory survey of some basic background assumptions suggests that one cannot expect a simple and unequivocal answer to the question of why a certain change has occurred in language. The only purely internal factor about whith we

Analytical procedures 11 can be positive with respect to schwa is analogy; analogy, as noted, however, provides a satisfactory explanation only of the spread of already existing new forms, i.e. the source of the proportional model for the analogy should be available before it can start affecting more and more forms in the l a n g u a g e . External factors, sociolinguistic, or contact-induced processes, must be brought into the picture; they can provide significant additional information in the account of schwa loss, especially in reference to the surface morphological composition of previously inflected grammatical classes: nouns, adjectives, and verbs. The discussion of theories of the origin and mechanisms of language change presented here has not been concerned with the "actuation" of change, in terms of transmission patterns as described by scholars studying language acquisition. Change can be attributed to the way children and adults acquire and modify language. This particular aspect of the "transition" of change is unrecoverable in the written records; in the absence of any relevant historical information attempts at making reasonable use of the notions of "actuation" and "transmission" in an acquisitionist sense is futile. Emphasis in this study will be laid on "change", which brings to the fore the dynamic aspect of language. "Change" is a concept which comprises two separate and discrete stages in the development of any diachronic process: the stage of innovations, and the stage of actual change, the latter involving "the generalization, or codification of innovations" (Andersen 1974: 22). At the same time an analysis which aims to uncover the network of functional relations within the limits of one historical period must necessarily assume the existence of an idealized, relatively homogeneous, synchronic bulk of language. Each Middle English text examined will be taken as representing one such synchronic state. Synchronic states can then be compared to each other to reveal the dynamism, instability, variability, potential or actualized "change" in a diachronic perspective. This theoretical position, ideally achieving a perfect compromise between the synchronic and diachronic approaches, has gained universal acceptance and requires no special justification.

Notes Chapter 1. Schwa in the history of English

1. Angled brackets < > are used throughout the text for graphemes; squares [ ] enclose allophones; slashes / / enclose phonemes. Italicized -e is used as a

12 Schwa in the history of English cover notation for any final -e, prior to defining it as a grapheme, a phoneme, an allomorph, or a morpheme. Curly brackets { } are either morphemic or enclose members of a set. 2. The length of the stressed vowel in the forms quoted in the text has been left unmarked if it is irrelevant to the discussion. 3. See Jordan (1974: § 133-135), also Luick (1921-1940: § 440). 4. This type of mutual enhancement of sound change and analogical change is discussed in Zirmunski (1954: 38 ff.): "It is not always [the case] that phonetic changes disorganize the grammatical system...." Here Zirmunski refers specifically to the regular phonetic reduction of final unstressed syllables as a very significant factor in the development of the inflection in the Germanic languages. In this case the phonetic process eliminates the discrepancies within the old grammatical system and thus interacts with morphological analogy to create a new, more unified, and consistent system. Zirmunski believes also that analogical tendencies ... "contribute to the improvement and perfection of the grammatical rules of a given language in accordance with special internal laws of its development" (1954: 28). I take "improvement" and "perfection" to imply that a morphologically uniform paradigm is somehow superior to a formally heterogeneous one, an interpretation which renders this statement unacceptable. Of some interest is another point which Zirmunski makes in this connection,however, namely that internal, i.e. inflectional analogy restores the unity within the paradigm of a word, separating more rigorously the root morpheme as the bearer of the objective (material) meaning of the word (1954: 31). This is an important typological observation about word structure in the Germanic languages and in English in particular; morphological analogy related to the weakening to and loss of {-e} results in realignment and concentration of the semantic and grammatical information on the root. 5. The controversy over the legitimacy of functionalist arguments and explanations continues (see Lass 1987a, 1987b; Samuels 1987). 6. The type of "economy" discussed here should be differentiated from the unfortunately synonymous, but highly desirable economy of linguistic description within the generative framework. The reference here is to functionalist economy, an idea which most linguists have dismissed as untenable. Yet as recently as 1981 a whole book (Krustev 1981) was devoted to the absurd task of "explaining" a series of changes, phonological, morphological, syntactic, derivational and even graphic, from the principle of economy. This extreme and oversimplified view cannot be found in the works

Notes 13 of A. Martinet, one of the leading proponents of the theory of economy as a trigger of phonetic change. Krustev himself is apparently aware of the unacceptability of such an extreme position (1981: 7) yet he proceeds with the analysis of selected data which is supposed to convince the reader of how strikingly "economical" the Bulgarian language is. Similar examples in other languages would be easy to quote; this would defeat the idea of the "exceptionality" of the Bulgarian language with respect to economy. An equally impressive body of "uneconomical" changes in any one language renders the effort futile. A more acceptable position with respect to economy has been defined in Budagov (1974: 36-37), who lists eight points which either refute the notion altogether, or caution the linguist against mixing up "economy" with "linguistic differentiation", "economy" with "regularity", "abstract linguistic economy" with "economy in the individual speech act" etc. Also, Budagov's discussion points out an apparent contradiction between the principle of economy and the tendency in language to maintain a dynamic equilibrium between form and meaning (optimally one form - one meaning), and between simplicity and complexity. 7. Cf. King (1969: 62-64, 84): "Linguistic change is change in competence, not change in performance·, it is change in the grammar, not originally change in the output of that grammar" (1969: 84, italics King's). 8. Avrorin characterizes the dependence between the structure of language and its functional aspect in the following way: (1) Although this dependence is unquestionable, it is neither absolute nor automatic; (2) The dependence is not total, and (3) It is unidirectional, irreversible, i.e. language function is not determined by language structure, while the opposite is true (1975: 26-27). 9. The type of contact-induced account introduced here is a subset of the more general category of "external" explanation which "seeks motivation in terms of something that exists outside of and independently from the grammar" (Kenstowicz 1981: 431). On the definition of "functional" in relation to "external" see. Avrorin (1975: 23-33). In his classification the structural development of language is called forth and regulated by two kinds of stimuli: (a) internal laws which exist by virtue of the necessity of regulation of the linguistic structure and b) various extralinguistic, more precisely extra-structural factors of social nature. The first type influence the structure of language directly and are localized exclusively in it; the influence of the second type of factors is

14 Schwa in the history of English exerted to a greater or lesser extent through the mediation of the functional aspect of language. 10. "It is argued that the fundamental changes which took place between standard literary Old English and Chancery Standard English: loss of grammatical gender, extreme simplification of inflexions and borrowing of form-words and common lexical words, may be ascribed to a creolization with Old Scandinavian during the Old English period. The Midland creole dialect could have stabilized as a spoken lingua franca in the reign of Knut. Its nonappearance in literature was due initially to the prestige of the OE literary standard" (Poussa 1982: 84). 11. The nature of the linguistic material analyzed in this study precludes, or at least limits severely observation of ongoing change, the study in vivo; therefore I have not included several otherwise (synchronically) important lines of investigation, namely: (1) Trace the distribution of the change through successive age levels of the population (The Transition Problem). (2) Determine the degree of social correlation in the process of embedding of the change in the social structure (The Embedding Problem [b]). (3) Determine directly the level of social awareness as a property of linguistic change (The Evaluation Problem). 12. Another point underlined in Weinreich, Labov and Herzog's general principles for the study of language change is that: "Linguistic and social factors are closely interrelated in the development of language change. Explanations which are confined to one or the other aspect, no matter how well constructed, will fail to account for the rich body of regularities that can be observed in empirical studies of language behavior" (Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968: 188). 13. For a discussion of this issue see Hogg (1979: 58).

Chapter 2 More background: Accounts of schwa loss

2.1. Choice of sources Descriptive accounts of specific language changes are the empirical basis on which historical linguists build their views and formulate their theories. Histories of English are not unique in drawing extensively on earlier statements and conclusions, and indeed it would be absurd to conceive of scholarship without continuity. It is no surprise then that certain accounts keep recurring in the standard textbooks, and that one finds relatively little variation and originality in comments concerning the loss of schwa in English. What follows below is a survey, and commentary, on some popular and influential statements which provide the input to my own findings and interpretations of this specific issue. 1 The choice of representative sources is based on the following criteria: (1) Author's interest in the chronology and causation of the developments in unstressed syllables. (2) Originality in the presentation of the textual data and in the interpretation of the motivation for the change. (3) Impact of the book on subsequent scholarship in the field; an inevitably subjective perspective on the author's scholarly stature and the prestige and popularity of his work. It should be noted that a number of original and influential books on the history of English do not concern themselves specially or at all with the developments in the unstressed syllables. This makes (1) an automatic and selfevident first criterion. (2) is prompted by the fact that many of even the best historians of English repeat previous authors, sometimes expanding the textual references, yet without suggesting a different interpretation. The danger of subjectivity in (3) is not great, because it is contingent upon (1) and (2), on the availability and originality of opinions on the history of schwa.

16 More background: Accounts of schwa loss 2.2. Lorenz Morsbach (1896): Mittelenglische Grammatik Lorenz Morsbach's Mittelenglische Grammatik is one of the first influential Middle English grammars, concentrating solely on the phonetic changes between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries. Morsbach proposes a more precise subperiodization of Middle English into: (1) Early Middle English - c. 1100 to c. 1250. (2) Central Middle English - c. 1250 to c. 1400. (3) Late Middle English - c. 1400 to 1500. These chronological labels are only approximate, yet they can be linked to clusters of linguistic changes, the availability of texts, the development of the literary tradition, and to real extralinguistic events. They provide a useful frame of reference. Most of the developments discussed in this study occurred during the first two periods, Early and Central Middle English, but the first half of the fifteenth century still shows some survivals of schwa in final position, so reference will also be made to Late Middle English. Mörsbach takes the existence of [-a] as an uncontroversial fact about the vocalic system of Middle English. He describes it as a "weakly sounding, unclearly spoken -e vowel" (1896: VIII), but in spite of its assumed similarity with [e] he is consistent in using the special phonetic symbol [a] for it. The chronology of the changes affecting the [-a] is presented as follows: (1) c.1100 toe. 1250. The changes of unstressed -e are listed by Morsbach under the "basic features" [Hauptmerkmale] of the period (1896: 4). During that period unstressed -e is "still preserved in many cases"; this latter observation represents the characteristically noncommittal tone of the accounts familiar from the textbooks. As early as 1896, and to the present, schwa loss has been an area of research where qualifications of the type often, mostly, frequently, etc. mark the limits of precision with which the process is described. Such vagueness is inherent in the nature of the material, and I will not be able to avoid it any more than previous scholars have done, yet the level of precision can be improved by looking closer into the patterns exhibited by individual morphological classes. On a more positive note, Mörsbach clearly underlines that by 1100, and certainly long before 1250, the final [-a] in a number of words was no longer pronounced; and sometimes it was not even written.

Lorenz Morsbach (1896): Mittelenglische Grammatik 17 (2) c. 1250 to c. 1400. This is the period during which the process of schwa loss reached its climax. From "occasionally disappearing" [-a] became a sound which was only "occasionally preserved" in the South; in the North it was "almost completely" silent. In spite of the ambivalence of this early account, there emerges a picture of rapid and pervasive loss; any survivals of schwa after this period of 150 years can be regarded as aberrant and have to be analyzed separately. In the section covering c. 1250 to c. 1400 Morsbach also remarks on the frequent occurrence of cliticization attested in the spelling of very early texts (1896: §48), especially with pronouns, prepositions, adverbials, etc., thus: delder = de elder, 'the elder', nart = ne art 'are not', tane = to âne, 'to one', kiddit = kidde it 'made it known', caldis = calde es 'is called'. The recognition of this phenomenon is an important initial step in establishing the significance of such forms for the reconstruction of the spoken language. Morsbach recorded the evidence, but offered no comments on the implication of such spellings for the interpretation of the prosodie organization of the speech of the period. The criteria on which Morsbach relies for classifying the reduction of vowels to [-a] and their loss in final position are syllable stress within the word and phrasal stress within the sentence: (1) Weakly stressed position within the word (1896: §67-§81), and (2) Weakly stressed position in the sentence (1896: §81§85). Group (1) includes cases of reduction and shortening in derivational suffixes (e.g. -hod 'hood', -döm '-dom', -les '-less', -lich(e) '-ly' ,-ere 'er', -ig '-y' etc.), in which some reduction is assumed on the basis of later changes, but for which there is no indication of the reduction in the spelling. One would assume that the consistent spelling of these suffixes is related to their independent status in the morphological inventory of the language; also, it may suggest the preservation of a certain amount of secondary stress, or at least the potential for it. Morsbach does not comment on the morphological autonomy and stressability of these items; he only enumerates them and remarks on the possibility of short and long vowels coexisting in such suffixes until Late Middle English. The assumption of different levels of stress in derivational suffixes and the second elements of compounds on the one hand, and in inflexions, on the other, relates stress to the accompanying changes of vowel quality and quantity, and Morsbach's observation, though left undeveloped, is undoubtedly germane to the issues raised in this study. Chapter Four returns to the discussion of this problem. Vowels in fully unstressed syllables make up the remaining part of Morsbach's group (1). Such vowels were weakened already in Old English and

18 More background: Accounts of schwa loss "not infrequently disappear completely" (1896: §68). Morsbach seeks the "natural" explanation of this process in the accentual organization of the language, resulting in concentration of the main expiratory force on the first syllable of non-compound words, which is usually the root syllable. The less energetic pronunciation of unstressed syllables makes them susceptible to reduction and loss. This is seen as a gradual process which can be inhibited by various tendencies, lying in human nature [Psyche], in the construction of the speech organs [im Organismus der Sprachwerkzeuge], as well as in the mechanism of language transmission [Überlieferung], True to the Neogrammarian model, Morsbach paid homage to the importance of analogical factors in bringing about the changes in unstressed syllables, but he jeopardized the acceptability of this particular argument by admitting that "the power of analogy can either preserve or destroy" (1896: §68).^ With respect to the issue of regularity of sound change Morsbach was more extreme than most scholars in that school, more Neogrammarian than Paul, whose view of the nature of sound laws is more moderate. Though compelled by the nature of the evidence to accept variation and "irregularities", Morsbach was clearly trying to present a uniform picture of the changes.^ Morsbach treats separately instances of schwa loss in final syllables following syllables bearing secondary stress (1896: §72), thus ME laffdig < OE hlafdige 'lady', ME allmess < OE aelmesse 'alms' etc.), and concludes that in such trisyllabic words the apocope of final -e could depend on the quantity of the root syllable: -e disappeared after a long root syllable holi 'holy', hardi 'hardy', but manie 'many', bisie 'busy', i.e. a short root syllable does not favour the loss. The reference here is specifically to Kentish, but a similar dependence is observed also in the South West (Robert of Gloucester).^ In the section describing the ultimate loss of -e in final position (1896: §75), Morsbach notes that both Old English final -e and the "analogical" -e (whose existence in itself is an indication of loss, but Mörsbach seems to ignore this obvious inference), began to disappear in Early Middle English. Morsbach's reference to an "analogical" -e is potentially confusing: it can be interpreted as both the unetymological insertion of schwa, and as the replacement of other vowels by schwa. The more likely inference from his discussion in general is that that what he meant was the "analogical" schwa was the one resulting from neutralization. He believes that such "analogical" influences were behind the change initially, and later the development was carried through under the impetus/pressure [Wucht] of phonological factors, more specifically strong stress on the root syllable. The uneven geographical spread of the change is recognized:

Lorenz Morsbach (1896): Mittelenglische Grammatik 19 the earliest instances of loss are recorded in Scotland and the North Midlands, whereas in Kent, and in the South in general, the process took much longer. It should be noted that in a later work Morsbach's position on the impoverishment of the inflexional system in Middle English adumbrated later functionalist and creolist oriented treatments. In his 1913 Grammatisches und psychologisches Geschlecht im Englischen he wrote: "Den ersten Anstoss zu dieser Bewegung gab die Erweiterung der ursprünglich engeren Kasus-b e d e u t u η g e η und infolgedessen die Vermischung und der teilweise Zusammenfall der Kasus (Synkretismus)". [The first stimulus for this development came from the broadening of the originally narrow case meanings and, as a result of that, the mixing and the partial collapse of the cases (syncretism)]. In other words, in his later work Morsbach believed that some functionally defined cause antedates the phonological and analogical changes of Middle English (Morsbach 1913: 7)ß Two points emerge from this earliest comprehensive survey of the issue: First, the difficulty of establishing the chronology and localizing the change, ensuing from "the lax metrical structure of a lot of poets, the influence of foreign patterns, poetic conservatism and some others" (Morsbach 1896: §75, Anm.). Second, in spite of some obvious and persistent problems with the evidence, definite statements about schwa loss have been attempted. Thus, in the South: "final -e is generally preserved intact in Kent until the middle of the 14th c." (Morsbach 1896: §80). These conclusions are mainly based on evidence from The Ayenbite of Inwyt (1340), a prose text in which the preservation of final -e may be scribal and traditional, another issue which requires elaboration. There is no agreement among scholars on the significance of the presence or absence of scribal : we are warned not to assume that absence of final -e in the dative case, the weak declension of adjectives, the past tense of weak verbs etc., is indicative of loss of -e, presumably meaning general schwa deletion in nonmorphological contexts (Luick 1921-1940: §473, Anm. 2; Jordan 1968 [1934]: §141 Anm. 2, etc.). On the other hand the grammatical significance of this morpheme is admittedly allowed to be totally suppressed or greatly obscured in poetry. To maintain that presence of -e in some morphological functions signifies preservation of schwa, while absence of -e from inflexions does not signify loss, without any further attempt to qualify or justify these statements, is confusing. These questions will be addressed in the following chapters, after I have reviewed the textual evidence in terms of chronology and type. The picture of spread of schwa loss one can extract from Morsbach is the following: Between 1200-1300 loss affects the North; from 1250-1350 the change spreads into the Midlands, and between 1300-1400 it affects the language of the South. This is a rough summary: as pointed out earlier, Morsbach describes

20 More background: Accounts of schwa loss the final -e with vague approximations such as "mostly preserved", "largely lost", etc. In that form his observations are very much in keeping with the results of later studies of this development. Finally, and in a separate section, Morsbach treats the changes of the unstressed vowels in words which are likely to appear under reduced sentence stress. Old English long vowels tend to get shortened in this position (OE butan 'but', OE us 'us', OE tzning 'any', etc.). There is also an interesting commentary on the cases of elision, which Morsbach attempts to interpret in phonetic terms (1896: §84). He describes elision as a transition of the type of movement the vocal cords make in producing a vowel from "glottal catch" in OE to "clear glottid" or, perhaps, "gradual glottid" in Middle English. This account is within a frame of reference no longer used by phoneticians today, yet it is of interest as a precursor of more recent attempts to define the original conditions, the domain, and the effect of wide spread elision, as well as its articulatory nature.^

23. Karl Luick (1921-1940): Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache The Historische Grammatik by the Austrian scholar Karl Luick, of which only the phonology was completed, has been enormously influential in forming the views of subsequent generations of philologists and historical linguists. In this monumental work, as well as in his many individual studies of texts and specific phonological processes in the history of English, Luick departed from the atomistic tradition of his predecessors and focused his attention on the interrelation and overall implications for the system of individual phonetic changes.and dialectal variants. Luick was concerned with the directionality and causality of sound change, and with the organization of the individual phonetic units into larger units - syllables and words. His 1898 treatment of the quantitative changes in the history of English is a fine example of an almost precocious view on the optimality of syllable structure as the trigger of quantity adjustments. Luick was meticulously detailed in his exposition: the wealth of information based on textual evidence in his historical phonological writings has remained unsurpassed to this day. Nearly 60 pages of the Historische Grammatik are dedicated to vowel changes in unstressed position, the most ever written on this subject in one book. The developments he covers fall within the period from the eleventh to the fifteenth century. Vowels in pre- and post-tonic syllables are treated separately, in great detail and are accompanied by numerous textual references. Separate sections

KarlLuick (1921-1940): Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache 21 discuss the changes of the unstressed syllables in native and Scandinavian words on the one hand, and in loan words of French and Latin origin, on the other.^ Luick dates the initial reduction of unstressed vowels uncontroversially: it started in Old English and preceded Middle English, because the spelling with was firmly established in all Middle English texts proper (1921-1940: §440). Unlike Morsbach, he did not attempt to distinguish the -e resulting from the reduction of various vowels from the short vowel phoneme /e/ in stressed position. (The phonemic slashes are not Luick's, but his overall treatment of phonetic entities would justify their use in reference to his work). The reduced vowel became by far the most frequent and the most typical vowel in unstressed syllables in Middle English. Luick's section on the development of vowels in syllables outside the main accent opens with a statement of two tendencies shared by stressed and unstressed vowels. One is the tendency towards simplification, the other is the multiplicity and diversity of changes of both types of vowels, attributable to the influx of numerous loan words in the language (1921-1940: §439). Luick stays within the limits of phonetics/phonology proper; there is no discussion of the morphological motivation or significance of the reduction, which would imply that he regarded absence of stress as the primary impulse for the change. The scenario which unfolds following the basic assumptions is familiar: absence of stress causes reduction, reduction is the first step towards complete loss. Luick supplies a very thorough documentation of the environment in which loss was most frequent, he covers in detail the chronology and the geographical distribution of the change. Hiatus, frequently accompanied by orthographic evidence of cliticization, is assumed to have been the first environment in which loss of a weak final -e set in. Schwa loss in hiatus in Middle English was a continuation of an Old English process. Luick quotes MSS of the 10th c. which exhibit forms such as wen ic Ί hope', scegdic Ί said' for wene ic, sœgde ic (1921-1940: §452). The observation is not new; what is interesting here is the original comment Luick offers in the discussion of the change in this environment. He writes: "Later (i.e. after Old English) elision became more frequent and more general as a result of the acceleration of the speech tempo; [italics DM's] even before Orm's time each posttonic -e was lost in the spoken language before a following vowel or the h - of weakly stressed words" (1921-1940: §452). This change was not generally reflected in the spelling; as usual spelling remained conservative. This is a very early attempt to establish a relationship between the written forms and their prosodie significance in the literature on schwa in the history of English. Elision, in Luick's opinion, was so regular, "that it must have had a basis in the spoken language" (1921-1940: §452 Anm.). This quite intriguing

22 More background: Accounts of schwa loss observation has not been followed up in the literature. I believe that it deserves more attention; some of the discussion in Chapters Six and Seven will focus on the possible importance of schwa loss evidence for our understanding of the prosodie organization of speech. Another environment in which loss of final unstressed -e occurs very early is weak position of the whole word within the limits of the sentence. This development affects auxiliaries, conjunctions, various non-major class words, and is fully attested by the twelfth century (1921-1940: §454 1.). Some examples of the change are: when 'when' for OE hwanne/hwenne, als 'also, as' for OE ealswa, but/bot 'but' for OE butan, wer 'were' OE wœron. etc. Trisyllabic words are also likely to undergo the change at a very early stage, thus: lafdi 'lady', OE hlcrfdige, almes(s) 'alms', OE celmesse, orrest 'struggle', OE orresta, etc. Referring to this particular instantiation of early schwa loss Luick brings up the issue of causation and once again suggests "acceleration of the speech tempo", especially in colloquial speech, as the reason for the suppression of secondary stress, in the case of derivatives, which leads to a loss of the final syllable.** Luick proposed a relatively early dating for the change in loan words from French and Latin, namely during the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century, contingent upon reduction of the secondary stress in words such as mater e 'matter'. Since -e was the only post-tonic syllabic vowel in Old French, it was replaced by the native -e and shared its fate, thus sir 'sir' for sire, dam 'dame' for dame,frer 'friar' for frere etc. Unlike other authors who place the loss of French final -e earlier of later than the corresponding loss in the native component, Luick dismisses the possibility of separate treatment of the loan vocabulary in the spoken language on the basis of evidence from versed The appearance of longer preservation of unstressed final -e in French words he attributes to either a peculiarity of slow and careful speech, with secondary stress still realized, as in words of the type cumpanie 'company', or as possibly misleading scribal testimony, due to adherence to the French spelling models (Luick 1921-1940: §461). Schwa loss in native words in general is traced under the heading "complete loss" [gänzlicher Schwund] of final -e in a separate detailed section (§ 473). Luick defines "complete loss" as the development which deletes the schwa from the unstressed syllable of disyllabic words, as in fare, helpe, love, tonge, etc., i.e. the lexical items that do not normally fall into the groups outlined above. His description is very definite both with respect to the chronology and the geographical distribution of the process: "The loss is completed in the North by the time of the appearance of our first texts, therefore it was carried through

Karl Liúck (1921-1940): Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache 23 during the thirteenth century there" (Luick 1921-1940: §473), a statement qualified by the expected comment on the slow rate at which spelling catches up with the changes in the spoken language. The graphic history of the final -e in Luick's outline includes also the emergence of the familiar practice of preservation or unetymological addition of the letter to the end of words containing a long vowel + a simple consonant, thus: fare 'fare', wife 'wife', wine

'wine', föte ' foot'.

In summary, Luick's account of the changes in final unstressed syllables emphasizes the specific contexts for early disappearance of schwa: hiatus, lack of prosodie prominence within the phrase or the sentence, and trisyllabic structure. The explanation proposed for this process is purely phonetic. The intriguing reference to "acceleration of the speech tempo", repeatedly mentioned as the factor causing reduction and loss in and of unstressed syllables, is not elaborated further or substantiated in any way. Taken at its face value the assertion has a rather bizarre implication — the argument can be reduced to the statement that at some point in the history of the language its bearers must have been seized with some inexplicable urgency to speak faster. Coming from a scholar of Luick's stature and erudition, though, the observation cannot be ignored; indeed as I hope to be able to show later, some of the apparent absurdity of Luick's early intuition is dispelled is we place the discussed phenomena in the appropriate prosodie perspective. 2.4. Richard Jordan: (1934 [1968]) Handbuch der mittelenglischen

Grammatik

Richard Jordan's treatment of the processes in unstressed syllables is quite detailed.'® Jordan differs from previous scholars in the way in which he traces the chronology of the loss of final -e in relation to the conditioning environments. In his view it is the syllable quantity that determines the course of the loss in trisyllabic words: final -e disappeared as early as the twelfth century after a long first syllable, thus laffdig 'lady', OE hlkfdige, allmess 'alms', OE œlmesse, etc. As regards the complete disappearance of final -e in all environments, Jordan proposed a somewhat earlier date than other scholars, especially for the Northern dialects, i.e. all final -e's are lost in the North already in the thirteenth century (1934 [1968] : §138). Jordan underlined the morphological implications of the change. At the end of the section covering loss in final position he writes: "Not to be confused with phonetic loss of final e, but functional in nature is the early Middle English loss of e in dat. sg. as a result of fusion with acc. into an objective case" (Crook 1974:

24 More background: Accounts of schwa loss §141). No further comment is offered on the possible interrelation between the two developments. 2.5. Wilhelm Horn/Martin Lehnert (1954): Laut und Leben. Englische Lautgeschichte der neueren Zeit (1400-1950) The period covered by Horn and Lehnert's famous book only marginally overlaps with the assumed chronological span of schwa loss. By 1400 final unstressed -e is generally believed to have been lost in speech in most environments. Questions concerning the chronology, dialect distribution, the relevance of syllabic structure, etymological origin etc. in relation to this development are not discussed in Horn and Lehnert's work. In one sense, however, their treatment is radically different from all previous accounts: they provide the clearest functionalist statement concerning the factors leading to loss of final -e in English. Horn and Lehnert formulated a hypothesis, according to which the loss of -e should be attributed first and foremost to its functional insufficiency [Funkrionsarmut]. The account refers to the fact that in Middle English the expression of syntactic relations was increasingly taken over by non-morphological means. This independently motivated change rendered the final -e redundant. In support of this hypothesis Horn and Lehnert remind us of the familiar examples of Old English loss of -e in prepositional phrases, e.g. to dœg 'today', instead of to dœge, cet ham 'at home', instead of œt hame (1954: §306). The argument is not pursued any further; later in the book the authors remark that a particularly heavy stress on the root syllable is a condition for the loss of the vowel in the following syllable. In this respect the account repeats existing accounts which rely on reduction under weak stress.^ 2.6. Karl Brunner (1962): Die englische Sprache, ihre geschichtliche Entwicklung. Vols. I, II Karl Brunner's account of schwa loss differs from that proposed in previous studies in the following points: (1) The beginning of the change is dated somewhat earlier than in most other historical surveys. Brunner refers to schwa loss as a change taking place "gradually, from the twelfth century onwards" (1962, 1: 348). (2) Brunner draws attention to the metrical evidence for loss of -e in the earliest poetic works of the period, and notices rhymes of words in which the

Karl Brunner (1962): Die englische Sprache, Vols. I, I 25 final -e appears to be retained with words in which a final -e is not justified etymologically. In rhymed verse written in the North the -e is assumed to have been deleted already around 1300 (1962, 1: 349). Brunner's attempt to build into his account evidence from rhymes is quite unusual. (3) According to Brunner's account the Late Old English syncretism between the dative and the accusative case is a development preceding the loss of -e in time, but not conditioned by it; the early date of the elimination of the morphological differences between the two cases is not regarded as being in a causal relationship with the subsequent phonological loss of final -e.

2.7. Joseph Wright and E. M. Wright (1923): An Elementary Middle English Grammar This very influential textbook covers the development of the vowels in unaccented syllables in English in considerable detail. Special attention is given to both the morphological significance, and the phonological aspect of the change. Concerning the chronology of the loss of final -e the authors state that "...it is only possible to fix approximate dates for its loss" (1923: §139). Judgments about the date of the loss are based primarily upon evidence from accentualsyllabic verse, but Wright and Wright add a caveat against exaggerating the importance attached to metrical evidence. They approach such evidence with caution on the grounds that poetry in general allows conservative language patterns, and thus some features of the "poetic" language may lag behind the developments in the normal spoken language. The dating of the loss as suggested by the Wrights is as follows: (1) In the Scottish and Northern dialects it had ceased to be pronounced in all forms by about the middle of the thirteenth century. (2) In the dialects of the Midlands final schwa had ceased to be pronounced in all forms by about the middle of the fourteenth century, but the loss of final -e in pronunciation began in some parts of this large area at a much earlier date (1923: §141). Wright and Wright take an interesting position on the interrelation between the quantity of the stressed syllable and the loss of -e. They assume final -e to have "disappeared or rather ceased to be pronounced earlier in disyllabic forms with a

26 More background: Accounts of schwa loss short stem syllable than in those with a long stem syllable" (1923: § 1 4 1 ) . N o concrete textual evidence is quoted to support this statement. Wright and Wright comment also on the way in which final -e was lost across the vocabulary. "In all dialects it disappeared in pronunciation earlier in nouns and verbs than in adjectives, and earlier in the strong than in the weak declension of adjectives" (1923: §141). This interesting observation is made almost in passing, and the possible reasons for this particular sequence of events are not discussed. The context of the account remains strictly segmental phonological. Like Jordan, the Wrights believe a long stem syllable to have accelerated the loss in trisyllabic words. The discrepancy between the assumed effect of the quantity of the stem syllable on di- and trisyllabic words in their account has not been discussed, or even noticed, in the literature. If the observation could be substantiated, it would present a challenging phonological problem. Finally, a feature original with their textbook, Wright and Wright propose different rates of attrition for the final -e in French and in native words, compare to the comments on that issue made by Luick discussed in section 2.3. They suggest that in French words, especially after st, ce [-s] and after vowels, e.g. best(e), tempest(e), plac(e),foli(e) etc.), the final -e disappeared in pronunciation earlier than in words of English origin (1923: §230).

2.8. Fernand Mossé (1949): Manuel de l'anglais du moyen âge In the section dedicated to the history of the unstressed vowels Mossé offers the following comments: phonetically the vowel developing in final position is "vague" (1949: §36), loss of -e began in unaccented form words: whanne, whan 'when', Sanne, dan 'then', bute, but/bot 'but', etc. The change was gradual, affecting the North during the thirteenth, and the Midlands and the South in the course of the fourteenth century. Unlike the Wrights who speak of a "short stem syllable" as favoring the change in disyllables, Mossé believes that loss occurred first in disyllabic words with a short root vowel. No evidence is quoted to support this claim, however, and one can only speculate that this might have been an impression based on later spelling, i.e. the lack of in the Modern English spelling of words descended from the -VCe type (e.g. sone 'son').

Fernand Mossé (1949): Manuel de l'anglais du moyen âge 27 2.9. Jacek Fisiak (1970): A Short Grammar of Middle English Fisiak's Grammar provides an explicitly phonemic account of sound change in the history of English vowels. Fisiak assumes the existence of a separate phoneme /a/ in Late Old English which remains unchanged in Middle English, and is represented in spelling by . One special property of this phoneme is that it is subject to a distributional constraint: it can only occur outside primary and secondary stress (1970: 36). Though the possibility of analyzing schwa as a member of a separate subsystem for the unstressed vowels does not come up, Fisiak recognizes that "in a weakly stressed position Middle English had two phonemes /i/ and /a/" (1970: 46). 13

2.10. Peter Erdmann (1972): Tiefenphonologische Lautgeschichte der englischen Vokale The account proposed by Erdmann proceeds from the assumption that schwa loss is not exclusively a phonological problem, but it falls also in the sphere of morphology (1972: 221). He states, obviously disregarding the account proposed by Horn and Lehnert, that "so far the history of the unstressed syllables has only been given a one-sided treatment from a phonological point of view, without a more detailed consideration of its grammatical relations and interrelations" (1972: 234). Against this background he proposes an analysis of the unstressed vowels prior to the eleventh century as morphophonemes. Within Erdmann's framework only one syllabic element remains in unstressed position after the eleventh century. This single syllabic element can no longer be described as a morphophoneme because it participates in no alternations. From the eleventh century on /a/ is described as a "Silbenträger unbestimmter Qualität" (1972: 227). In the fourteenth century this unstressed vowel falls together with zero. There is no discussion of the possibility of /a/ maintaining a contrastive status in Middle English. At the end of his book Erdmann indicates that schwa loss can be treated in terms of grammaticization of sound processes. He relates the history of the unstressed vowel to Open Syllable Lengthening in Middle English. The information carried by the unstressed vowel is not lost when the vowel itself is lost; open syllable lengthening has the effect of "preventive sound change" through which syntagmatic information is paradigmatized and which makes

28 More background: Accounts of schwa loss possible the dropping of the final unstressed vowel (1972: 234). Though this is an attractive idea and the scenario has been argued for in some famous cases of phonological change, this kind of analysis is not automatically applicable to schwa deletion in English. ^ Some immediate arguments against accepting this idea would be the following: the vowel schwa was lost in absolutely final position in all words in the language, whereas it was only in some very special environments that open syllable lengthening was operative; final -e appeared unetymologically in spelling and was allowed in the scansion of poetry, in lexical items where there is no evidence or theoretical reason to assume transfer of information, phonological or otherwise, from the paradigmatic to the syntagmatic plane.

2.11. Summary

2.11.1.

Causation

Various proposals have been made concerning the loss of /a/ in final syllables. The prevalent view relates the change to the absence of stress in that position. It is clear that in terms of of phonetic typology, both within the Germanic language family, and in general, it would be impossible not to connect the loss of final -e to the accentual pattern of English. Even scholars who look elsewhere for the factors behind the change, e.g. Horn-Lehnert, regard heavy stress on the root syllable as a basic precondition for the deletion. One assumption shared by all scholars in the field, therefore, is that the incipient reduction of the originally full vowels in syllables following the first root syllable was due to lack of stress. Progressive concentration of the main stress on the first non-prefixal syllable accounts for phonemic neutralization in final position. Neutralization clears the path for the ultimate loss of -e, which is seen as the logical continuation of a process of long standing, potentially affecting the final syllables in all Germanic languages. The correlation between stress and phonetic reduction is a very important aspect of the description of the change. However, while it is difficult to conceive of vowel loss directly, without the intermediate stage of phonetic reduction, so that reduction must be seen as a necessary condition for schwa loss, reduction in itself is not sufficient for the implementation of the process. Thus assuming reduction as the crucial motivation for schwa loss does not answer the question why stress should have become increasingly stronger on the root syllable, and

Summary 29 why deletion is not a universally Germanic phenomenon, i.e. why has the same process not been carried to what would seem to be its logical completion in other Germanic languages. The fact that loss occurs in some Germanic languages but not in all of them argues against the plausibility of a purely phonetic account of the change. Reduction and loss are two different processes and while initial reduction can clearly be stress related, the same is not true of deletion. Phonetic reduction in English initiated a series of complex developments which have to be analyzed in the context of a thoroughgoing reorganization on the prosodie, phonological, morphological, and the syntactic systems of Middle English. Another factor contributing to the loss of final -e, which all scholars accept, openly or implicitly, is analogy. It is a conveniently general, and psychologically and intuitively powerful factor in the propagation of this type of language change. Analogy in Late Old English and in Middle English narrowed the range of paradigmatic variation on the morphological level. The extent to which this was really decisive in bringing about the loss must be evaluated with reference to the textual data on morphological vs. purely phonological instantiation of loss. Overrating the analogical factor can be dangerous in describing the change; depending on the angle of analysis, analogy can be taken as either the cause, or the aftermath of a change spreading gradually across the vocabulary. Without dismissing analogy as an important parameter of schwa loss, I will be cautious in attributing too much importance to it. Two other factors have been suggested in accounts of schwa loss, both of them formulated originally by Luick First, as noted above, Luick repeats several times (1921-1940: §452, §456, etc.) that "acceleration of the speech tempo" underlies the change, a claim which remains enigmatic in his work. Speculating on what he meant when he suggested that speech tempo should also be brought into the picture would lead to the assumption that the loss of -e was preceded, accompanied by, or resulted in a change in the rhythmic organization of the spoken language. Alternatively, it might be possible to see rhythmic organization as the historically stable, invariable background, against which schwa deletion evolved at a particular time because of a combination of various factors. Secondly, Luick also speaks of "multiplicity of developments through the influx of numerous loan-words" (1921-1940: §439).^ The effect of massive borrowing of foreign vocabulary on the development of the morphology of Middle English needs further elaboration. In phonological terms this extralinguistic consideration of mixing two morphological systems may be helpful in suggesting why the root syllable was burdened with such a central role in the process of communication in Middle English, attracting more and more

30 More background: Accounts of schwa loss stress in the process, and making post-tonic syllables irrelevant morphologically and non-viable phonologically. A major obstacle to any strong claims in this direction is the fact that the textual evidence in Middle English does not warrant a commitment to an extralinguistic motivation. Again and again in the texts we find Scandinavian and native words behaving in the same way with respect to their final syllables and vowels. On the other hand, the correlation between the geographic distribution of schwa loss and what we know about the demographic situation in Late Old English and Early Middle English does lend support the "external influence" view. Words of French and Latin origin, when not conforming to the native pattern, may have remained synchronically foreign in the distribution of their stress; therefore they are likely to fall outside the scope of native deletion rules. Schwa deletion in Middle English has been attributed to one, or a combination, of the following factors: phonetic reduction, morphological insufficiency, analogy, prosodie organization, external influence. An adequate description of the whole process will have to take all these factors into account and reevaluate them. The relation of the change to the syntactic patterns in Middle English is another link which has so far been recognized and investigated only superficially. 2.11. 2. Chronology and geographic distribution Existing studies of schwa loss deal also with the chronological order and the geographic spread of the change. The following generalized picture emerges from the survey of the literature on the subject: (1) 1100 - 1250: by the end of this period the change was well developed in the North and it had started to affect some more Southern dialects in which final -e disappeared in trisyllabic forms, in unstressed words, and in hiatus. (2) 1250 - 1350: this was the period when loss of final -e became ubiquitous: it spread from the North into large areas in the Midlands; by the end of the period it was completed in all positions in those areas. The South also participated in this process, but its effects there are slower and less pervasive. (3). 1350 - 1400: final schwa became the rule throughout the Southern areas. Instances of survival at the end of the period must be attributed to archaic use. By 1400 final unstressed -e had been abandoned in all parts of the country.

Summary 31 This outline is very similar to the earliest full account of the developments in unstressed syllables supplied by Morsbach. The composite picture, including major later sources: Luick, Jordan, and Brunner, suggests the additional possibility of shifting the beginning of the change back, to c. 1100. A more detailed account of the chronology as attested in individual texts is presented in Chapter Three.

Notes Chapter 2. More background: Accounts of schwa loss

1. The study of the various sound changes is perhaps the most thoroughly covered branch of English historical linguistics, with a long and venerable tradition in both descriptive and theoretical issues. It is an unnecessary and a downright impossible task to try and cover everything that has ever been written on the history of the final unstressed vowels in English. This chapter will present selectively familiar standard accounts of the problem under discussion; the type of wisdom inherited and imparted to students. Papers dealing with specific points as well as individual text studies will be discussed later. 2. More specifically, Morsbach mentions the following major factors counteracting phonetic change: analogy, the desire for clarity, the difficulty of a sudden change in the position of the speech organs, the historical transmission of language in connected and unconnected speech, and finally the influence of the written language (conservatism of the poetic and formal styles), the trenchant regulating activity of man towards language. Morsbach's interpretation of the evidence is clearly in the psychophysiological tradition of H. Paul's Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (1880). One can assume this to be the case, although Morsbach makes no reference to Paul's work. Paul's principle of greater comfort ("deviation in one direction ... suits the organs of the speaker better", 1880: 56) is paraphrased as "difficulty of a sudden change in the position of the speech organs"; the account of the the ways in which language change is transmitted is also Neogrammarian. 3. This is not the appropriate place to go into the history of approaches characterized by "atomization" vs. "generalization". The scholarship in

32 More background: Accounts of schwa loss English historical linguistics is rich in instances of carrying both approaches to extremes. For a recent debate on the incompatibility of detailed empirical descriptions and the desire for generalizations in the form of idealized theoretical constructs such as the Great Vowel Shift in English see Stockwell and Minkova (1988a, 1988b), Lass (1986,1988). 4. This study will not concentrate on the evidence for and the analysis of loss in medial syllables, syncope, which began very early, especially in West Saxon and Kentish, but was not completed until Early Modern English. The effect of syncope on the language as a whole is more limited than that of schwa loss, its chronology is much more diffuse, and though it is a phenomenon with possible interesting consequences for both the phonology and the history of versification, I will not be addressing these issues here. 5. The full text of this statement, as quoted in Dahl (1936: 12) reads as follows: Dieser Prozess, dessen Anfänge bis in die westgermanische Zeit zurückgehen..., beruht auf mancherlei psychologischen und physiologischen Ursachen. Den ersten Anstoss zu dieser Bewegung gab die Erweiterung der ursprünglich engeren Kasus-b e d e u t u n g e n und infolgedessen die Vermischung und der teilweise Zusammenfall der Kasus (Synkretismus). Es folgte die l a u t l i c h e Trübung der f o r m a l e n k l a n g l i c h e n Elemente, vor allem durch die Minderung der Bedeutungsstärke, bis zum Verluste fast aller kasusunterscheidenden Suffixe und dem völligen Schwund der Kasusbedeutungen. Zahlreiche A η a 1 o g i e Wirkungen und in geringerem Grade A k z e n t Wirkungen, die jedenfalls nicht die Hauptrolle spielen, haben dann zugleich die massenhaften Verschiebungen der Kasussysteme bis zu ihrer völligen Auflösung m i t verursacht. Es ist möglich, ja bis zu einem gewissen Grade wahrscheinlich, dass die Übersiedelung der Angelsachsen nach England, und später in seht verstärktem Masse die Vermischung mit skandinavischer und französischer Bevölkerung diesen Prozess b e s c h 1 e u η i g t haben [1896 : 7 — emphases Morsbach's]. 6. There is no readily available phonetic justification for the avoidance of hiatus at any stage of the development of English. I return to this issue in Chapter 4. 7. Pre-tonic reduction falls outside the immediate range scope of this study and will therefore be referred to only in passing. Section 2.3. covers only Luick's account of the changes in post-tonic syllables.

Notes 33 8. The idea of acceleration of the speech tempo is also used in the following context: In the case of morphologically simple forms, e.g. ever 'ever', OE e of or, acceleration of the speech tempo underlies the need for shortening, which in Old English was usually manifested through syncope OE aefre, but in Middle English, where final -e is weak grammatically, it is frequently subject to apocope (Luick 1921-1940: §457). In his Historische Grammatik Luick confines his comments on reduction and loss to final open unstressed syllables (Luick 1921-1940: §460). In closed final syllables the unstressed vocalic element developed into a vowel which was half way between /e/ and /i/ and which has been preserved to this day: wallis 'walls', askid 'asked'. 9. See for example the assumption that final -e in words of French origin was lost before the respective -e's in words of native origin. This view was taken originally by Wright and Wright (1923). As far as I know, evidence supporting this assumption has not been presented systematically, or convincingly, anywhere. 10. The publication history of this important work is complicated. Richard Jordan's Handbuch der Mittelenglischen Grammatik was completed in 1925. It was revised by H. Ch. Matthes in 1934, and its bibliography was updated by Klaus Dietz for the third German edition in 1968. A translation into English and a revision by Eugene Joseph Crook appeared in 1974.1 have used both the German edition, referred to as 1934 [1968], and the revised English edition of 1974, referred to as Crook (1974). 11. It is difficult to judge what the qualification "particularly heavy" stress on the root syllable is supposed to mean, since this would imply that there were root syllables that were not heavily stressed, and therefore preserved their final vowels, which is exactly the opposite of what occurred in prosodically weak environments, pronouns, auxiliaries, etc. It is also puzzling to try and interpret the statement that "the difference between stressed and unstressed syllables was greater in the North than in the South" (1954: §305). 12. The difference between "disappeared" and "ceased to be pronounced" is not clear, and is probably nothing more than a stylistic infelicity. 13. The phonemic significance of the change has been discussed in some phonological studies, e.g. Kurath (1956), Arakin (1976), Plotkin (1976), etc. However, these treatments are concerned with the implications, with the effect, rather than with the cause of the development, so I postpone the discussion of these points for Chapter 4.

34 More background: Accounts of schwa loss 14. See Abemathy (1963) on the loss of the jers in Slavonic. Also, for a more detailed treatment and a summary of the research in this area cf. Zhuravlev (1977). The loss of the weak reduced vowels in Slavonic does not result in a parallel loss of "useful" oppositions. The latter are preserved in the shape of consonantal oppositions (palatalized vs. unpalatalized consonants). In this process of functional "transfer" the loss of the weak Slavonic jers acquires linguistic significance. The situation we are discussing is much more complicated, though, because of the dual nature of the -e. 15. This notion should be kept separate from the creolization, or "interlanguage" idea about Middle English originating with Jespersen.

Chapter 3 Textual evidence

3.1. Principles and methods of the study of schwa loss in Middle English

The survey of the literature in the previous chapters points clearly to some objective difficulties inherent in dealing with the evidence for schwa loss in Middle English: very sporadic written testimony, overlapping of phonology and morphology, persistence of spellings with final long after it was uncontroversially deleted from the pronunciation. One additional complication is also the absence of an agreed upon methodology for investigating such material. It seems quite surprising, indeed, that with so much written on the chronology, geographical spread, and the causation of schwa loss, the basic question of how we know that schwa was lost in the first place has not been addressed explicitly anywhere. The purpose of this chapter is to present the textual findings, but before piling up data, I need to clarify some points of methodology and search techniques used to collect that data. Unlike the phonological analysis of modern spoken languages which can fall back on actual phonetic records and instrumental measurements, historical phonology relies entirely on the secondary evidence supplied by a handful of often imperfect surviving manuscripts and on comparative and dialectal evidence. Inevitably then historical phonology is a network of assumptions, logical constructs, never coming close to empirically verifiable "truths". This speculative character of historical phonological studies has been recognized for a long time and has received due attention. Diachronic phonological studies proceed from the assumption that the extant sources were composed on the basis of meaningful and systematic contrasts of graphemes and combinations of graphemes, and that these graphemic contrasts correspond to a reality of phonological contrasts in the spoken language.* The term "fit" has been proposed and used as a working cover term for the matching of graphemes and phonemes, according to which a graphoneme is "a class of signs, each member of which represents the same phoneme", and an allographone is a member of such a class (McLaughlin 1963: 32). The analysis of the Late Old English and Middle English material proceeds from the assumption that a grapheme in word final position was used, though

36 Textual evidence not absolutely consistently, for one phoneme, i.e. the basic graphemic-phonemic fit was : [-a]. One difficulty in establishing unequivocally the graphemicphonemic correspondences for final -e arises from the use of the identical alphabetical symbol < e > for short and long vowel phonemes in stressed position and in digraph spellings: < ea, eo, eu, ue >. Another problem is the use of other graphemes, and , in final position in some texts where other texts would use . The significance of these spelling variants for the analysis of the phonemic systems whose members they represent merits more attention in the philological literature. These spellings can be interpreted as either evidence of an attempt to signal a systematic phonemic contrast within unstressed syllables or, alternatively, one can assume allographic spellings of the -e, given that their subsequent history is identical. Taking the second view would entail the introduction into the argument of considerations which lie outside the written letter, and bringing into the picture our knowledge of later history. The introduction of non-graphic criteria lessens the importance of the notion of "fit". Ideally, one should strive for a balance between the useful notion of "fit" and considerations of a non-mechanical, non-graphic nature: other features of the linguistic system of the period, hindsight, etc., especially in view of the complete discrepancy between the persistence of final -e's in spelling and the non-realization of phonetic material in that position for 600 years. Chapter 4 returns to the discussion of these issues. The problem of the interpretation of the evidence in the manuscript material has been addressed from a different point of view by Mcintosh (1956, 1963). Providing an alternative to the "relational", linguistically based, structurally motivated approach to the analysis of the texts, he draws attention to the possibility of gaining important insights into a document's dialectal provenance and chronology by the study of "non-linguistic" aspects of the manuscripts: spelling variants, handwriting, the use of tachygraphs such as: ), etc., as in: -n, printed as -ne, or -t' printed as -te, i.e. non-alphabetic symbols, used in conjunction with the normal alphabetic symbols. The distribution of final -e in Early Middle English texts from this point of view remains to be examined. ^ Some comments on the possibility of gleaning useful information from this untapped source are included at the end of this chapter. Schwa loss during the Middle English period is axiomatic in all standard descriptions of the history of English. What kind of evidence is there for the loss of the phonetic substance of -e during that particular period? Apart from the clearly inadequate graphemic-phonemic "fit" mentioned above, can there be any other way of establishing presence or absence in the pronunciation of final -e in a particular text?

Types of evidence 37 A definition and classification of the types of available textual evidence for schwa loss provides a necessary taxonomic framework for the study. The isolated comments, found scattered in textbooks and various studies, as well as the fuller treatments of schwa loss surveyed in Chapter 2, suggest that a really orderly, verifiable, and infallible picture is perhaps beyond our reach, even more exasperatingly so than with the historical analysis of stressed vowels and consonants. An attempt at specifying and channeling the various types of data from the examination of the textual material, however, may yield some more systematic results.

3.2. Types of evidence The evidence for the presence or absence of final -e in Middle English can be separated into two major groups: graphically marked (scribal) external evidence, and graphically unmarked (inferential) internal evidence. 3. 2. 1. The scribal evidence Under the rubric graphically marked scribal evidence are included both instances of omission of the final -e, and unetymological and ungrammatical additions of -e. This classification presupposes reliance on the "fit" between the graphic system and the hypothetical sound system reconstructed for the period. Decisions concerning the appropriateness of a morphological [-e] refer necessarily to idealized morphological paradigms in Late Old English and Early Middle English. Unetymological additions of final are thus labeled on the basis of standard dictionary forms. When not otherwise specified, my sources of reference have been Quiik and Wrenn (1957), and Campbell (1959) for the morphology, and Holthausen (1934) for the Old English dictionary forms. Compositions in either prose or verse can be used as sources for graphically marked evidence for schwa loss. Prose texts are much less helpful in this respect: the information such texts yield is seriously hampered by the existence of scribal traditions, reflecting, one would assume, earlier pronunciations. It is therefore customary to label those instances of loss, where the absence of -e cannot be attributed to morphological attrition "scribal errors", as is also customary to infer that such "errors" signal increasing discrepancies between the spoken and the written form of the language. Middle English prose compositions in general exhibit fewer, and chronologically later, instances of violations of the expected

38 Textual evidence spelling, and of relaxation of grammatical, presumably prescribed, rules than the poetic texts. In spite of regional differences, at the beginning of Middle English, c. 11501200, and clearly also long before that, there existed a common body of scribal techniques, taught in the medieval scriptoria. The unevenness in the frequency of "errors" in prose texts compared to poetic texts should not be attributed to a difference in the scribal tradition for prose and poetry. The apparent laxness of spelling and grammar in verse is licensed and enhanced by the constraints of meter. If we are justified to assume that most verse compositions were written to be read aloud, then it follows that omission of a final -e must have occurred on occasions when the authors or scribes were faced with the choice of violating either the prescribed rules of grammar and the traditional spelling, or the metrical pattern of the composition. Studies of preChaucerian verse structure show that in many cases it can be very difficult to determine whether a verse line is unmetrical or ungrammatical — and the prevalent view has been that early verse is somehow metrically "imperfect". Written evidence of schwa loss based on poetry must therefore be treated cautiously. On the other hand, the metrical patterns in many Middle English poems are observed quite rigidly, especially if we allow the poets the liberty of using final -e's optionally. Assuming priority of the basic metrical template over traditional, or archaic, linguistic features will allow us to use poetry as a valuable source of information about the state of the spoken language. Graphically marked evidence of schwa loss can be separated further into the following subclasses: 3.2.1.1.

Syntactic alternation of final -e with zero

The data presented in this section includes alternation, within the same text, of forms with and without final -e in the same syntactic function, in grammatical contexts where only forms with -e should be expected had the change not started. This alternation of -e with zero is referred to as morpho-syntactic loss. Ideally, morpho-syntactic loss involves one and the same noun, pronoun, adjective, or verbal form appearing in two graphic forms in identical syntactic environments. In practice morpho-syntactic loss is found initially affecting only isolated items of the vocabulary, in what seems to be a rather erratic fashion, a situation which can be attributed to loss starting earlier with some items than with others, an instantiation of the pattern of language change known as "lexical diffusion". There is also the possibility of a purely accidental lack of alternative forms in the surviving manuscripts, a matter of statistical inadequacy of the

Types of evidence 39 material. From a more general systemic point of view, schwa loss can affect one whole morphological class earlier and more consistently than another, a line of inquiry not fully developed in the available studies of schwa loss. Graphically marked morpho-syntactic loss comprises some of the earliest examples of loss of final -e in Middle English. Instances of it are available in both prose and poetic texts, though, as already noted, morpho-syntactic loss is predictably much less frequent in prose, where the normative spelling influences override and obscure the availability of options in the spoken language. In poetry morpho-syntactic loss may both favor and violate the metrical structure; it can do away with an extra syllable in a line and improve its metricality, but it can also occur in lines where -e loss is not required by the meter, and, indeed, in some cases, where it runs against it. Such unmetrical non-occurrences of a written will constitute an especially interesting and important evidence with regard to the whole change. 3. 2.1. 2. Syntactic alternation of zero with final -e Unwarranted addition of to items for which the normative morphology would not require it in a particular function, is the obverse of 3. 2. 1. 1. In view of the general direction of the change, occurrences of this type are naturally much less frequent than omissions of the final -e. Graphic addition of -e can be interpreted in two ways: first, a consistent unetymological addition of -e may be an indication of a shift, a reorganization of the morphological patterning, e.g. -e may be added with regularity only to the nominative forms of feminine nouns becoming a generalized case-gender mark». Second, a scribal can be a diacritic device used to signal quantity of the vowel in the preceding syllable. Neither interpretation would interfere with the purpose of the search: if -e can be added freely to various forms, this can only mean that it has already taken on a function different from the one it used to have, so its phonemic and morphemic status has changed to allow this behavior. In this subclass, too, one expects to find more frequent attestations in poetry than in prose texts for the reasons given above: in poetry the final -e can serve as a slot-filler when an extra syllable is required by the metrical structure, in spite of prescribed spelling practices. Similarly to the omissions, there are instances of -e added without the justification of improving the metricality of a line, in fact totally against the meter, so it can not be regarded as "metrical", or "remedial" and will therefore represent valid evidence for the scribe's uncertainty of the relevance of the graphic sign.

40 Textual evidence 3.2.1.3.

Elision

Elision is loss of final -e before words beginning with a vowel or h-. Elision may or may not be grammatically significant; when the elided -e is also an inflexion, elision results additionally in morpho-syntactic loss. Such cases of elision represent a subset of the data classified under 3.2.1.1. Instances of elision are especially frequent in poetry, but they appear in prose as well, and it is in prose that they constitute more interesting and valuable evidence. Elision may or may not be accompanied by phonetic and graphic cliticization, depending on the grammatical nature of the adjacent words. Evidence of elision antedates most other types of loss of schwa; this fact has either been ignored totally or, when recognized and recorded, has not been addressed in terms of its significance in terms of causation and rate of implementation of schwa loss. 3.2.1.4.

Evidence from rhymes

Rhyme evidence is restricted to poetry. In some printed editions of Middle English texts information on the spelling of rhymes can unfortunately be obscured by the editors' own interpretation of what the rhyming pairs should have looked like. As in the case of editorial emendations discussed below, this presents a problem only when such emendations are inserted without reference to the state of the manuscript. Evidence from rhymes is a standard source of information in historical phonology. Pairs in which one of the rhyming words preserves the final -e while the other one is -e - less fall into this group. It can be argued that this type of data does not constitute a very reliable source of information; the evidence of such rhyming pairs can be used both to prove and to disprove loss of final -e. Admittedly scribal omission of the in rhyme may have been fortuitous, but at least this sort of inconsistency might suggest that the situation with regard to the -e was possibly unclear in the scribe's mind. 3.2. 1. Secondary editorial evidence Data under this rubric includes scribal "errors", corrected by the editor, and the insertion of -e for original special non-alphabetical symbols for final -e. The term "error" is chosen deliberately; it differs from the more general type of "occasional spellings" in that "errors" are perceived as such by textual editors, which would not be true of all "occasional spellings". Editorial insertion of final -e's, when acknowledged, presents no problem; these cases can be fitted into

Types of evidence 41 one of the subclasses discussed in the earlier sections. Separating editorial emendations in a subclass of their own is justified only in view of the fact that a good editor's feel for the language is the closest one can get to a native speaker's grammaticality judgement, so one can take editorial interference with the original as significant in a special way: these are the cases where a rigid prescriptive norm, as understood by people steeped in that material, has been violated. Silent expansion of hypothetical -e's, and the unmarked rewriting of manuscript tachygraphs render the editions in which this particular liberty was taken quite useless in the study of schwa loss. Unfortunately, many early, otherwise good editions, contain an editorial note to the effect that final -e's and tachygraphs have been expanded, without further comment in the text. I have avoided using editions with such silent expansions — the data in the corresponding section below is based on acknowledged editorial "prejudice" in favor of the normative spelling or grammatical form. 3. 2. 2. The internal evidence The second type of potential evidence, the graphically unmarked/internal evidence is speculative, inferential, and less reliable than the written evidence. The nongraphic inferences about schwa loss are based on scansion. This kind of information is restricted to poetry; its use in a linguistic argument would be justified by the assumption that poetry makes use of forms available in the spoken, non-poetic language. There is no agreement in the literature on the value of poetic, metrical evidence in historical studies. Poetic language is always based on the spoken language, but the degree of deviation forced by the verse template may vary from poet to poet, and from poem to poem. Metrically (as opposed to rhythmically) organized language underlies verse composition and the exigencies of an abstract versification pattern may be held responsible for phenomena not generally attested in non-poetic sources. In how far compliance with, or deviation from the metrical pattern constitutes a valid basis for conclusions concerning the spoken language is a matter which cannot be solved holistically; each individual document must be evaluated separately. However, mismatches between an "ideal" metrical pattern and the surface appearance of constituent elements in poetry have long been used as a source of information about the range of variation allowed in the behavior of linguistic units. One traditional area in which poetry has been considered useful and revealing with respect to the implementation of certain historical phonological changes, is the study of rhymes. Classifying the types of evidence for phonemic changes Penzl

42 Textual evidence (1957: 15) recognizes the following subgroups of metrical evidence relating to the structure of lines of poetry: (1) The appearance of stressed or quantitatively marked syllables in a determined sequence. (2) The pattern of alliteration. (3) The demands of assonance and rhyme. Among these, rhyme evidence is usually regarded as the most valuable and reliable type. Penzl tacitly underlines this fact by including only examples illustrating the significance of rhymes in his separate heading "Metrical Evidence" (Penzl 1957: 19-20). However, the nature of Middle English alliterative verse, and preChaucerian rhymed verse makes rhyme evidence for schwa loss highly controversial; one can't claim even remote certainty in the presence or absence of final -e in Middle English if both items end in and if this is etymologically and/or grammatically justified in at least one of the items. A famous case in point, illustrating the impossibility of coming to a satisfactory conclusion is the controversy over Chaucer's verse-final -e's. Arduous argumentation has been presented both in favour of the view that verse-final -e in Chaucer was still pronounced, and in support of the opposite view, namely that it was inorganic both in rhyme and elsewhere in the line, cf. the exchanges by Donaldson and Southworth in PMLA, 1947, 1948. The issue remains unresolved; it has now become conventional to read verse-final -e in Chaucer as syllabic, yet there is very little beyond the sheer force of a philological tradition going back to the nineteenth century to favour this interpretation over its alternative. The decision to sound the final -e's in Chaucerian rhymes is indeed arbitrary; sounding or not sounding the final -e does not affect the rhymes — in either case they would be perfect. One could argue, on the one hand, that the very limited preservation of -e elsewhere in the Chaucerian corpus would weigh in favour of pronouncing rhymes of the type säte : röte as male rhymes, i.e. like likür : flür. This assumption would be sanctioned further by hypothetical pairs in which both rhyming words are written with -e in violation of etymological or morphological expectations, but I am not aware of the existence of such pairs in Chaucer. On the other hand, an assumption of lexical diffusion of schwa loss and uneven spread of the change for the various word classes would allow the possibility of sounding some rhymes spelled with -e, and not sounding others. Patterns of line internal scansion provide another potential source of data on schwa loss. The versatility and inconsistency of the Middle English poetic practices have often been emphasized, yet the delicate balance and prioritization of

Types of evidence 43 verse structure vs. schwa loss has not received much attention. As already mentioned in this section, if we take the understanding of a basic verse structure as axiomatic, we could formulate prosodie rules for Middle English the application of which would produce highly "regular" verse. There is some danger of circularity in this kind of argument, but additional evidence can be adduced in favor of greater reliance on the metrical competence of medieval poets.3 More research is needed in this area. With the notable exception of The Ormulum, and perhaps, to some extent, The Owl and the Nightingale (Tarlinskaya 1971: 78), the poetic documents of the period have been assumed to allow rather generous variation in the number of syllables per line. The margins of variability fluctuate from poem to poem; there are many lines in which two alternative scansions are both possible and metrical, e.g. the second line in: Rymenhild 9at swete ping Wakede of hire swooning/* 'Rymenhild, that sweet thing, awakened from her swooning.' Most verse compositions documents, however, do follow some basic scheme, a drastic deviation from which will render a line unmetrical even to the uninitiated, and authorities on the subject agree more often than not on how to scan a particular line. If the omission of a final -e, or -e's is involved in the metricality judgements, if it can make or destroy a line, there is reason to assume that the poet was dealing with linguistic options, and that the clash between the written form and the metrical norm is perhaps spurious. In many cases this clash reveals a discrepancy between the time of the composition of a given piece and the time it was copied: the normal picture one gets is that of a poem composed at an early date, handed down by oral tradition or preserved in an earlier manuscript, and surviving for us only in a later copy. By the time this later copy gets written the final -e's no longer make sense to the scribe, so he either ignores them, or starts piling them up against both earlier and contemporary grammatical norms, unetymologically, and, more interestingly, unmetrically. It is this particular combination of unetymological and unmetrical final -e's that can be taken as valid evidence for the stage that -e loss has reached. Within the larger group of graphically unmarked loss of -e it would be reasonable to separate the cases of elision from the cases where loss can be inferred in non-elision environments.

44 Textual evidence 3. 2. 2.1. Inferred elision Elision as a source of evidence was mentioned briefly in the classification of the types of graphically marked loss of schwa. The term "elision" is used following its definition in the Oxford English Dictionary as "the dropping out or suppressing ... a syllable in pronunciation before a following vowel or a weak ft". In modern phonological terminology "deletion" is sometimes loosely used for the same process, cf. Sommerstein (1977: 135). I prefer to keep the two terms separate, preserving "deletion" as the general term covering loss in any environment, and using "elision" for the subset of instances of deletion, occurring in the environments defined above. Elision in order to avoid hiatus is a common and well attested kind of poetic license across languages. It is a regular feature of Greek and Romance prosody, and it is not surprising to encounter the same phenomenon in Early Middle English verse compositions which were modelled on Latin or Medieval French versification. Poetic elision is more frequent than elision in prose; yet, since prose elision, too, is attested, this discrepancy should not constitute an objection to the use of data from poetic elision in the analysis od schwa loss. The limits of poetic license are notoriously hard to define. Since we have no direct access to the linguistic realities, I believe that for medieval compositions, at least, we have no other option but to project our modern notions backwards and assume that "we should not attribute to verse phenomena which are not present (albeit in less stylized form) in the language upon which it is founded" (Allen 1964: 3). Elision in poetry is indeed typically compatible with elision, or avoidance of hiatus in the spoken language. This is the case in the modern Romance languages. An analogy to the Middle English situation is supplied by the history of poetic elision in French where "... hiatus was permissible until at least the fourteenth century. There is no elision to prevent hiatus in Saint Alexis (about 1040), but in Froissait (ca. 13371410) there are 132 cases of elision against 5 of hiatus ... French tolerated hiatus in the Middle Ages, but ruled it out completely under Malherbe (17th c.)" (Preminger 1974: Hiatus). Thus the ultimate rejection of hiatus in French poetry was simultaneous with the "muting", the "amuissement" of the final -e in the spoken language which is believed to have taken place during the sixteenth and the seventeenth century. All Middle English poetic compositions exhibit graphically unmarked poetic elision side by side with graphically marked elision. Both types can also additionally represent instances of morphological attrition; i. e. "poetic" loss is interpretable as both a phonological and a grammatical option.

Types of evidence 45 3. 2. 2. 2. Metrical loss without elision The other type of graphically unmarked metrical loss of schwa, the loss before consonants other than h- is less widely attested in the Middle English texts. The main difficulty of using that source of data, as I indicated above, arises from the inconsistency of the syllables-per-line counts in poetic compositions. The Ormulum is the only medieval poetic document where absolute metrical regularity is non-controversial, so any violation of the scheme of fifteen syllables per line, no matter whether the deviation is marked or unmarked graphically, can be considered significant But the monotony of The Ormulum is quite exceptional. Also, it lies at one chronological end of the transition from accentual to syllabic verse, a transition which may have taken a long time to be effected, cf. Kökeritz (1961). We are still far from understanding fully the range and flexibility of early non-alliterative, syllable counting verse structure which might help us determine whether a "beginner" in the new tradition was sinning against his linguistic intuitions or practices, and where exactly the violations of the early poets lie — in the verse structure, in stress assignment, in grammar, in all or none of these. A statistical approach to the problem of consistency of the metrical structures in pre-Chaucerian verse was attempted by Tarlinskaya (1971). Among the texts examined by her it is The Owl and the Nightingale that exhibits the most stable syllabic structure: 70.3% of the lines are octosyllabic. 17.7% of the lines have nine syllables, but this means counting the final -e's as syllables as well. I have already referred to the possibility of an alternative approach to this type of verse, given more trust in the poet's metrical intuitions, see note 3. The number of "irregular" lines in this text would be drastically reduced if we count the final -e's according to independently defined prosodie rules which provide for deletion in more environments. The rest of this chapter presents each type of evidence for schwa loss in detail.

3.3. Graphically marked morpho-syntactic loss of -e

In sheer bulk and importance this group overshadows all other cases of schwa loss. Classifying instances of loss as belonging here, as well as maintaining the autonomy of the group as a whole, can be a delicate matter because of the high

46 Textual evidence proportion of examples which would simultaneously be legitimate instantiations of various other types of loss. The dual nature of final -e renders attempts at some kind of independent statistical picture very difficult, yet morphological loss needs to be separated from the kind of loss which has no morphological implications for obvious reasons: the reorganization of the inflexional system is probably a major cause, and certainly a major effect of schwa loss in Middle English; a blanket account conflating the phonological and the morphological aspects of the process is bound to blur important analytical points and will remain unsatisfactory. Examples are classified as belonging to this group when an item in a certain syntactic function presupposes final inflexional -e, following a generalized descriptive paradigm of Middle English, as in e.g. Mossé (1952), but the -e is missing from the text: e.g. cet ham 'at home', to deeg 'today*. Early scribal attestations of such loss are frequently used as an argument for the leading role of morphology in the loss of final -e, see Horn-Lehnert (1954: §306). The most comprehensive and detailed collection of Early Middle English and Middle English material with respect to morphological attrition appears in Dahl (1936). The theoretical background of the study is functionalist; the author addresses the issue from the point of view of correspondences between form and function, and declares his primary goal to be to formulate his own view on the problem of the decay of the case system in the history of English.^ Dahl classifies the analyzed material into cases of "fluctuation", defined as "usage oscillating between two forms of a certain word that perform the identical function in the same writer", and "incongruity" defined as "the collocation of inflected and uninflected forms of different words that belong to the same type" (Dahl 1936: 9-10). Incongruity is more cleary outlined in the text: "The phenomenon occurs when two substantives, whether placed in actual collocation or just in parallel position, are given a different treatment in respect of form, though historically they should have had the same ending in a particular function" (Dahl: 1936: 80). Both phenomena can be manifested as deletion of final vowels in the unstressed syllables of morphological inflexions. In texts of the ninth century fluctuation is rarely attested outside place names, and the noun ham 'home', both in place names and in the prepositional phrase cet ham. One interesting and relevant example of different forms in the same function is found in Harmer (1914: X, 14): pa hwile J>e fulwiht sio ...(line 23) pa hwile f>e fulwihtó sio ...(line 28-29) 'while the baptism is ... '

Graphically marked morpho-syntacüc loss of -e 47 Dahl's collection of early examples includes tenth century instances of fluctuation between biscop and bisceopt in the position of indirect object (Dahl 1936: 14). He also records a very early case of incongruity: mid sac and mid socne 'with litigation privileges and rights',which deserves special attention due to the formulaic character of such pairs, widely attested in later texts.6 I return to the linguistic significance of such formulaic expressions in Chapter S. All three twelfth century texts examined by Dahl show instances of fluctuation.^ In the Exeter Book (second quarter of the twelfth century) both proper and common nouns are affected by fluctuation, thus RogerlRogere, on drihten/on drihtene, heafod/heafde. Rivalry exists also between the endings nisl-nysse etc. The extent to which this fluctuation can be attributed to unstable correspondences between form and function varies. While the ratio between -nislnysse forms in predicative function is 8:6, suggesting uncertainty about the functionality of schwa in the nominative case, another factor must be considered — the predominantly polysyllabic structure of the words with this substantival suffix may have determined the alternation, i.e. the choice is made on prosodie grounds and the survival of schwa has no morphological motivation. Sporadic examples of fluctuation exist in the Exeter Book, yet the fact remains that "a great many words of this text testify to difference of function corresponding to difference of form" (Dahl 1936: 32). Another document from the twelfth century, the 1122-1154 portion of the Saxon Chronicle, contains a richer and more interesting body of data with respect to fluctuation and incongruity. All classes of nouns are subject to fluctuation. Here are some examples with common nouns: ... waes coren to abbot... (A.D. 656, p. 33) ... 'was chosen as abbot...' pa cwaed se kyning to dan abbode (A.D. 656, p. 33) 'then said the king to the abbot' Saxulf... waes paa gecoren to biscop (A.D. 656, p. 33) 'Saxwulf... was there chosen as bishop* 7 cynewulf man gehalgode to biscope (A.D. 737, p. 45) 'and Cynewulf was consecrated as bishop' he wolde ofstingan eadwine cininge ac he ofstang lillan his pegn ... 7 3one cining ge wundode (A.D. 626, p. 25) 'he intended to kill Edwin the king, but he killed Lilian his thane ... and wounded the king'

48 Textual evidence feng alfgar eorl to Öam earldom (A.D. 1053, p. 184) 'succeeded Alfgar earl to that earldom' feng harold eorl his sunu to dam earldome (A.D. 1053, p. 183) 'succeeded his son harold earl to that earldom' ... gefuhton ... on Sere stow (A.D. 456, p. 13) ... fuhton ...on dœre stowe (A.D. 455, p. 13) '... fought... on that place' mid his fingre gewrat on cristes mei (A.D. 656, p. 32) 'with his fìnger wrote on Christ's cross' gewriten mid here fingre on cristes mele (A.D. 656, p. 31)8 'written with their fingers on Christ's cross' It is difficult to extract statistics from Dahl's, or from any other such study, yet clearly the information is sufficient for us to outline the following picture: the most likely item to be affected by fluctuation are nouns, of all three genders, followed by pronouns, followed by proper nouns and place names. Dahl quotes no examples in the early texts of fluctuation involving final -e in the class of adjectives. He did not observe and comment on any dependence of the items exhibiting fluctuation on their phonological structure. All ninth to thirteenth texts examined are prose compositions, and the alternation between forms with and without -e is, in all cases, graphically marked by the scribe. The inference is unequivocal: final, -e was no longer a distinctive case marker by the middle of the twelfth century, at least in the North. So far there has been no discussion of the schwa-zero alternation beyond the limits of noun, adjective and prepositional phrases. The range of morphological loss can be extended to include verb inflexions and adverbial derivational {-e}. There is no survey comparable to Dahl's of the variation existing outside syntactic units involving nouns to which I can refer, so I present my own findings in some familiar texts. The Ormulum is believed to have been composed in a geographical region very close to that of the Peterborough Chronicle. It dates from the beginning of the thirteenth century, i.e. around 1200.^ It is an autograph manuscript, most probably written in the Northeast Midlands, possibly in Southern Lincolnshire, near Peterborough. The edition I used is that by White (1852), Vols. 1, 2. The poem, which seems to have been planned as an even larger piece of work, but of which 20 000 lines have been preserved, is an interpretation of the gospels. The composition

Graphically marked morpho-syntactic loss of -e 49 is in four parts named: Dedication (D), Preface (P), Introduction (I), and Homilies (H); the parentheses enclose accepted abbreviations. Throughout the poem the vowel in unstressed final syllables, both in covered and in absolutely final position, is consistently represented by the grapheme thus blome n. OE bloma, drinnkenn v. OE drincan, hœle η. OE hœlu, shame η. OE sceamu, nakedd adj. OE nacod, taldenn v. p. t. OE taldon, same adj. OE same, shinep v. 3p. pr. t. OE scinep , etc. This consistency is almost absolute with monomorphemic major class words, the only notable, and also consistent, exceptions to the generalized spelling in final syllables being: bisscopp/bisskopp n. OE bisceop, myrra n. OE myrra, and drihhtin n. OE dryhten.10 Proper names in this text must be treated separately because of their peculiar position with respect to the otherwise very rigorous spelling system devised by the scribe. They must have been regarded as "foreign" and display peculiarities such as doubling of vowel graphemes and the use of the graphemes , , , , not used elsewhere in the text. They are, however, part of the overall data from this text, since the vowels in the final syllables have been reduced and are spelled and obey the same tendencies as the native words. The major problem in using data from this lengthy religious poem consists in deciding whether omission of the final -e is "morphological" loss or whether it is attributable solely to the requirements of the metrical pattern. One of the greatest virtues of The Ormulum, the scribe's (or possibly scribes') rigorous adherence to the seven-foot line ^ is also a note of warning that grammatical "violations", whether written, or not, can be incurred as a consequence of seeing them as the lesser of two evils. The metrical pattern of the poem is absolutely rigid and unvarying, at times at the peril of changes in the expected natural stress of some words, thus affterr prep., pohhtenn v.p.t., primmnesse n. and many other polysyllabic words have to be stressed on the second syllable.^ The inclusion in this survey of the written evidence of examples which may, at first sight, be attributed to the desire to achieve "metricality" rather than to actual loss can be justified by in the following way: (I) Graphic loss is amply attested outside poetry, so the phenomenon, even if more pervasive in poetry, is not confined to verse. (2) The legitimacy of classifying such evidence as "real" morphological loss is supported also from a closer consideration of the type of lexical items affected by it. Whereas graphically unmarked elision occurs with all word classes, irrespective of their syntactic position and function, graphically marked loss of -e is restricted: it affects only some nouns.

50 Textual evidence adjectives and adverbs, and only in specific functions. Thus, the singular vs. plural distinction in nouns is regularly marked graphically in the poem, whereas within the singular paradigm the spelling differences between the old nominative, accusative, and dative cases are not maintained, see the examples below. With adjectives, too, graphic loss depends crucially on function: it occurs in the singular of strong adjectives, but an is invariably written in the plural forms of both weak and strong adjectives; the weak singular also preserves the -e in spelling. This highly selective treatment suggests very strongly that valid conclusions about the state of the language can be drawn from this poem. In an excellent detailed study of substantival, pronominal, and adjectival inflexions in The Ortnulutn Lehnert (1953) shows that in that text the -e was subject to phonetic loss which correlates with the loss of function this morpheme had undergone in a number of syntactic environments. The point is clear; here are some examples illustrating fluctuation (numbers refer to the respective lines in White's edition): Satt lefeôS wel o Criste (H 16909) 'that believes well in Christ' Surrh Satt tegj lefenn rihht o Crist (H 16920) 'because they believed rightly in Christ' Satt shollde risenn upp offdœd (H 4042) 'that should rise up from death' Satt Crist ras upp offdœde (H 4341) 'that Christ rose up from death' 7 brohht to grund 7 underfot (H 11773) 'and brought to ground and underfoot' to brinngenn him to gründe (H 12547) 'to bring him to ground' Satt he wass hofenn upp to king (H 8449) 'that he was raised to king' wass hofenn upp to kinge (H 8370) 'was raised up to king' oj^daeSess slœp to life (19253 H) 'from death's sleep to life'

Graphically marked morpho-syntactic loss of -e 51 Satt he ras upp off slœpe (H 3145) 'that he rose up from sleep' e joie of pe holi gost (102) 'the joy of the holy ghost' pe swetnesse of pe holi goste (406) 'the sweetness of the holy ghost'

Graphically marked morpho-syntactic loss of -e 53 f>et he heolde him et horn (172) 'that he held him at home' holde hire et home (170,172) 'hold her at home' f>e ilke puf o/his muf> (122) 'the same puff from his mouth' mid cosse of fiine mupe (102) 'with kiss from thy mouth' 7 ilice sparewe under rof one (142) 'and the same sparrow under a roof alone' £et is one under roue (152) 'that is alone under the roof bute vor neod one (6) 'except for necessity alone' buten uor neode (68) 'except for necessity* puruh sor 7 scheome (356) 'through sorrow and shame' puruh reou3fule sore weren gare ibet (272)^ 'through pitiful sorrow it would be prepared better' In addition to the numerous examples of graphically recorded morphological loss in native words, which we have come to expect by now, The Ancrene Riwle contains exhibits many instances of erratic case marking in borrowed words too, i.e. "the majority of Romance words have been found to take no vowel ending" (Dahl 1936: 94). Another text which yields interesting data with respect to the loss of -e is Genesis and Exodus, a metrical version of the Old Testament, composed c. 1250 in the East Midlands, possibly north of Norfolk. The line between cases of morphosyntactic loss "proper" and cases where the apparent motivation behind the loss is metrical is predictably delicate and difficult to draw. This particular source presents more problems of interpretation of the scribal evidence than The Ormulum since it differs from it in two ways: the metrical structure of Genesis and Exodus is not demonstrably particularly rigid, at least in the traditional views of pre-Chaucerian rhymed verse, and also, the manuscript copy of the poem, on which both available editions are based, is dated approximately 75 years after its presumed composition around 1250 (Morris 1873: XIV).

54 Textual evidence Nearly a hundred and fifty different lexical items, nouns, pronouns numerals, adjectives, and adverbs appear without the expected inflexional -e in Genesis and Exodus. The most frequent examples of a missing -e are those of case endings within prepositional noun phrases, in which the formal distinction between the old nominative, dative and accusative inflexion is no longer maintained. Thus we find ful o blis (110), ful o ¡if (111), wiputen erd (2094), wip sped, in turn, in/of lif, wip strif, bi wif to lond, wip wond, of/under a ston, etc. Omission of an inflexional -e can run against the metrical scheme of the poem, which is basically an iambic octosyllabic rhymed couplet. Thus, although weak adjectives generally preserve a much more stable inflexional -e than other parts of speech, there are occasional examples of the following t y p e : De strong god of ysrael (1846) 'the strong god of Israel ' Dat wod fole jjor ur of dage (3545)17 Brogten,... 'That crazy people there put Hur to death A large group of nouns in the text, etymologically disyllabic or trisyllabic, are consistently monosyllabic in all three grammatical cases, the nominative, the accusative and the dative. Thus one finds in Genesis and Exodus: mei for OE melu, gem for OE geme, eld for OE ieldu/e (the dropping of the second syllable renders line 1283 unmetrical) neet for OE neata, pl., licham for OE lichama, also with adverbs: wid for OE wide, mor for OE mar a. An analogical account of the occurrence of these forms has to assume influence from the functionally distinctive -e's, i.e. the final vowel (presumably schwa) was interpreted as a case marker and was abandoned along with the rest of the oblique case markers, and from there the loss was extended to the form of the nominative. Alternatively, and equally plausibly, the development may be attributed to phonological deletion affecting the item regardless of its function. This identification of the possible discrete sources of the change does not preclude joint, mutually reinforcing action of these factors. Graphically recorded loss of schwa presented here has been gleaned from texts originating from the Northeast, the West, and the East Midlands. Texts from the Southern dialects tend to be more conservative in their linguistic features in general, and evidence for schwa loss is no exception. Two one hundred line samples from Poema Morale turned up only two identical cases of graphic loss without elision out of a total of ninety eight cases of loss in elision environments.^ Two one hundred line samples from The Owl and the Nightingale

Graphically marked morpho-syntactic loss of -e 55 show fifty four instances of metrical loss in elision environments, but no graphic loss in non-elision contexts.^ Questions which have not been addressed in this section and which could only be dealt with by specially written computer programs for machine readable texts are: what is the ratio of -e - less vs. -e - ful forms for the same noun in the same function within one text, does this ratio change in different versions/MSS of the same text, how do these results compare to counts (for the same lexical item in the same function) in different texts — diachronically and diatopically, how do the ratios for different items within the same word class, say, nouns, compare for all these parameters? What one would hope to achieve by answering these questions would be a detailed picture of the implementation and actuation of schwa deletion across the lexicon in the various d i a l e c t s . W i t h all the uncertainties surrounding the data this would be an arduous task, which, even if executed with the assistance of sophisticated techniques, would not guarantee illuminating results to justify the effort. What we have established leaves no doubt, however, that by the middle of the thirteenth century schwa loss had affected nouns massively, rendering forms with and without a final -e homophonous in various grammatical functions. The selection of -e or zero, at least in the North, no longer depended on case assignment; other factors were instrumental in the process, such as phonetic environment, register, rhythmic euphony, whose intervention and interaction must be analyzed more carefully.

3.4. Unetymological final -e

The addition of a final -e to the stem of a form which did not have a corresponding final vowel in Old English, in a syntactic position where this is not predictable from the normative inflexional patterns of Late Old English and early Middle English, is the obverse phenomenon of schwa loss described in the preceding section. Separating out the evidence in this way allows us to focus on details which may be helpful in determining the origin of the change and perhaps the order of precedence of one type of loss over another. Examples of unetymological addition of a final -e are rarer in the texts and definitely more difficult to recognize than the graphically marked morphosyntactic loss covered in the previous section. The search strategy here is to identify forms with final -e in syntactic functions which would not be marked by

56 Textual evidence -e in Old English, e.g. nouns in the old nominative and sometimes the accusative case. Disyllabic and polysyllabic forms with a stem ending in a vowel are naturally excluded from this group. It is reasonable to assume that an "erroneous" addition of an -e correlates with functional loss of -e as a case marker: not perceiving the vowel as grammatically significant the speakers of the language felt free to extend analogically the more frequent oblique case forms and, in some instances, the plural forms, to all positions, thus producing a more uniform paradigm. The same result, uniformity of the paradigm was achieved by the loss of -e described in 3.3. Setting the two types of data, loss and addition, side by side leads to an interesting argument bearing on the causation of the change. If "morphological insufficiency" is assumed to have been the trigger for the loss of schwa, then that hypothesis would have to explain why the process did not develop in the oppositite direction, i.e. a ubiquitous spread of -e would conceivably be one plausible effect of "insufficiency". Also, the frequency of occurrence of the subjective (zero) and the objective (-e-ful) forms for the nouns appears fairly well balanced during the twelfth and the thirteenth century; moreover the statistical chance for the survival and proliferation of the -e-ful pattern would be further enhanced by the preservation of some -e noun plurals and the plural of adjectives. Such speculations cannot be pursued fruitfully; yet they are sufficient to warn us against the potential weakness of an account relying heavily on analogy. Unetymological insertion of schwa will be traced in three texts: The Ormulum, The Ancrene Riwle, and Genesis and Exodus, all of which were also surveyed in the previous section for graphic loss of final -e. The Ormulum provides ample exemplification of the freedom of inserting -e against the historical expectations: "Old monosyllabic masculines and neuters ... have two forms, with and without -e respectively, in functions corresponding to those of the old dative - and therefore also in the subject and object case" (Bennett and Smithers 1966: xxiii). Instances of this kind are quite numerous and are of the following pattern: wass mikell wegge till fiatt land (H 3472) 'was a long way to that land' or, with elision: an hffifedd mahhte iss mett 7 mœ|D( H 4584) 21 'one chief power is measure and moderation'

Unetymological final -e 57 where the Old English nominative and accusative form of the underlined nouns would have been we ζ 'way', and meaht 'might'. Other nouns in which the motivation for the appearance of a final -e could not be grammatical/inflexional include: shriffte OE scrift, waghe OE wœg, were OE wer, sipe OE sip, dale OE dcel, bede OE (ge)bed, bode OE (ge)bod, bure OE bur, dwilde OE (ge)dwild, gate OE geat, ahhte OE ce ht, bene OE ben, bisne OE bysen, dede OE Angl, ded. 22 A very large number of nouns belonging to the Old English feminine o- stems (with a consonantal ending in the nominative and an -e in the accusative) have the oblique case -e regularly carried through to the nominative forms: are OE ar, blisse OE bliss, gerrde OE gerd, helle OE hell, lade OE lad, lare OE lar, milice OE milts, sinne OE syn(n) etc. This groups includes some nouns which are attested only in the nominative case in this text: axe OE œx, beere OE beer, chesstre OE ceaster, shande OE sc(e)and, steffne OE stefn, wunde OE wund. For the class of masculine and neuter nouns Lehnert (1953: 24-25) attributes this widespread alternation in the poem to analogy with various other forms in the paradigm (old instrumentais, plurals etc.) and ends up enumerating a large number of disparate reasons for one and the same phenomenon, admitting eventually that waghe and were (both masculines in Old English) will have to remain "unexplained exceptions" (Lehnert 1953: 25). In comparision with masculine and neuter nouns feminine nouns display more consistency in preserving or acquiring unetymological final -e in the nominative. Lehnert goes as far as describing the final -e in the text as generalized in all cases and becoming a gender marker [Genuszeichen] in Middle English (1953 :25-26). This demarcation for Old English feminine nouns is not necessary, however there are allegedly feminine nouns not ending in -e such as: boc, brid, hannd, map, mille, nahht, etc. - nor is it sufficient, compare the masculine and neuter nouns mentioned in the previous paragraph. The undoubtedly analogical spread of schwa could have occurred only at the expense of the grammatical functions it had performed earlier. While it is not impossible to assume, with Lehnert, influence from French in the spread of -e as a feminine marker, one should also throw into the balance the unlikelyhood of very weak and unstable phonological material elsewhere in the system would be selected as a marker of a dying distinction. This is not the place to reopen the question of the loss of gender in Middle English, but one could hardly agree with Lehnert's classification of a noun such as boc as feminine in a text the preface of which opens with the lines: piss boc is nemmnedd Orrmulum Forrpi patt Orrm itt wrohhte. (P 1-2) 'This book is called the Ormulum

58 Textual evidence Because Qrm wrote it.* Grammatical polysemy is a natural phenomenon, of course, but in the case of Middle English there is no reason to assume that -e acquired a categorical additional function while shedding some of its earlier grammatical load. The situation with nouns of Scandinavian origin in The Ormulum is the same, only, naturally, the number of examples is more limited. Still, we do come across the forms bone Sc. bon, kide Sc. kid, late Sc. lat, rote Sc. rot, all of them used in this form in the function of subjects and objects. The unetymological metrical addition of a final -e occurs also in the singular of some strong adjectives. Examples of this phenomenon are found in Lehnert (1953: 34-38): forr to tacnenn uss eorplike shorrte lif 'in order to betoken to us earthly short life' annd ec eorplike shorrte sellée (H 1217) 'and also earthly short happiness' forr he m a ^ ben swa grimme mann (H 7174) 'for he may be such a grim man' Annd all hcepene folic wass paer (H 6797) 'and all heathen people were there' The pattern is not restricted to a particular phonetic environment. In the lines cited above there is no elision in the relevant items, but elision is also possible as in the following lines: acc he iss shepisshe annd bilewit (H 6654) 'but he is meek as a sheep and harmless' fiatt he be grimme annd aghefull (H 7112) 'that he be grim and baleful' These examples, too, illustrate the point that an -e can be added purely as a syllabic element devoid of grammatical function with the sole purpose of supplying the extra unstressed syllable required by the metrical pattern. The addition of an unetymological -e is related in an interesting way to the history of versification in English. If we accept the traditional view that preChaucerian accentual-syllabic verse allowed for a considerable freedom in the number of syllables per line, except for unimmaginative slavish imitations such as The Ormulum, then the assumed flexibility of the metrical template would

Unetymological final -e 59 argue against the necessity for the versifier to "violate" the grammatical rules of his language for the sake of the meter. If, on the other hand, we credit the poets with more metrical discipline and understanding, then the appearance of an unetymological -e becomes a logical consequence of the advanced process of schwa deletion in the vernacular. In other words, the hypothesis of the nonmorphological basis for the choice of -e provides a tool for repairing many of the "imperfect" lines of pre-Chaucerian syllable-counting verse. The attestations of unetymological final -e in prose would then provide additional evidence in favor of this line of argument. Here are some examples from The Ancrene Riwle in which the final -e is used unetymologically: p>e wei of [Disse worlde is sliddri (252) 'the way of this world is slippery' pe middle weie of mesure is euer güldene (336) 'the middle way of measure is ever golden' ower wil 7 Godes wil schal beon so iveied (188) 'your will and God's will shall be so joined' al fi i wille schal beon iwrouht (398)^3 'all thy will shall be done' Ser ha lei i prisun fowr öusent ger ant mare, heo ant hire were ba (31).^ 'there she lay in prison four thousand years and more, she and her husband both.' pench pet is godes gerd (184) 'think that (it) is God's staff he is Godes gerde (184) 'he is God's staff betere is liste rist (1229) 'With labor and heat thirst increased in them' And wunede por in pogt and care (1433) 'And dwelled there in thought and care' Quad god, find ic por ten or mo (1045) 'Said God: I will find there ten or more' Fro pe riche flod eufrate (1255) 'From the rich river Euphrates' Wid and fer to pe rede se (1256) 'Wide and far to the Red Sea' Of win and olie fulsum-head (1548) 'Of wine and oil abundance' Elision in this text is frequent; it can be both graphically marked and unmarked, yet, similarly to the practice followed in the prose text of The Ancrene Riwle, it is not obligatory. Graphically manifested contraction, too, is quite common, cf. Arngart (1968: 14-15): fonde = fond he, sette = sette he, caldit = calde it,fìndic = finde ic, liket = lik it. More evidence for early elision can be found in the A and Β texts of Lagamon's BrutP-9 This composition preserves the traditional Old English alliterative pattern and in spite of frequent occurrence of rhymes in some passages, introduced

Elision in hiatus 67 perhaps through the French original, there is no rigorous octosyllabicity in the poem; the number of unstressed syllables per line is variable. The inferences concerning elision in this text are based only on spelling, not on assumptions about a particular underlying metrical pattern; no effort has been made to judge whether -e would make any difference as far as the "regularity" of the meter is concerned.^ In this poem we find: for gold and for seoluere (A) 'for gold and for silver' for seoluer and for golde (A) 'for silver and for gold' ich ham one kinges sone (B) Ί am a king's son' ich ham on eorles sone (B) Ί am an earl's son' he geof an cniht al Kent (B) 'he gave all Kent to one knight* ich wolle eche cnihte geuen his rihte (Β) Ί want to give each knight his right' It will be noticed that in the pairs cited here the occurrence of elision correlates with the appearance of a string of unstressed syllables. The loss of -e in those strings does not produce a clash of two prosodically equally prominent syllables. While this can hardly be seen as the trigger for elision, it may be argued that the alternating stress principle in English enhances the likelihood of the process in environments in which the -e is flanked by one or more weak syllables. Lagamon's Brut also exhibits a phenomenon which is the mirror image of elision, the insertion of an unetymological consonant to avoid hiatus. Enumerating the chief characteristics of the (A) version (MS. Cotton Caligula A IX), Lewis (1963: xix) begins his list with the peculiarity called "nunnation", defined as "the addition of a final -n without etymological justification ... used to avoid hiatus before a word beginning with a vowel or Λ-." The example below illustrates this phenomenon: Her ich ageuen seiche cnihten is cunden and his rihten (730) 'Here I give each knight his lands and his dues' Ich hœten eou wurchen and bulden pa chirchen (734) Ί command you to make and build the churches'

68 Textual evidence Lewis also cites the forms penenen, togaderen, eoden, pohten as instances of nunnation in the text. In most cases the result achieved is the same as the that of elision, i.e. avoidance of hiatus. It must be noted, however, that nunnation is not always related to the avoidance of hiatus; it can occur in this text in non-vocalic environments, in which case any parallels with elision fail. The insertion of unetymological consonants at word boundaries which would otherwise involve hiatus is also a characteristic feature in the text of Cursor Mundi (c. 1300, North East Midlands), in which the treatment of final -e does not differ in any significant way from that in the documents already discussed. Hiatus in the poem is possible but infrequent. "The complete number of instances of hiatus after a neutral vowel... leaving out of account the doubtful cases and the infinitives, but including the cases of A- of Latin or Romance origin, amounts to fifty, or two to every thousand lines on an average" (Arend 1925-1932: 257). The graphically attested intervocalic link consonants are of interest because they highlight an important aspect of schwa loss in hiatus: the reluctance of the language to allow hiatus when the first vowel in the sequence is unstressed can be attributed to a possibly incipient phonotactic constraint on two unstressed syllabic peaks, both of which are short or "lax". Typologically, there is nothing in the nature of hiatus to render it undesirable, or "marked" in the phonology of a language. Studying the attestations of vowel sequences across languages, Bell and Hooper observe that "within the section, i.e. roughly the phonological word, V.V sequences are not permitted by about one half of the world's languages" (1978: 8). Some questions remains open: English, from the time of the earliest records, and certainly to the present day — compare the Modern English indefinite alan, the Early Modern English patterns of selection of my Imine, linking/intrusive -r has been hostile to hiatus across a word boundary. What is then the proper domain of avoidance of hiatus in English? Can this be revealing with respect to the history of schwa loss? Has the possibility of French influence been fully investiagated? Why are two adjacent short peaks undesirable, while a configuration involving a long or "tense" vowel plus any vowel is tolerated? I return to some of the issues of the phonological domain and preferred prosodie structure implications of elision in hiatus in Chapter 5. Other questions posed here require more research.

Rhyme evidence 69 3.6. Rhyme evidence

The chronological span of schwa loss coincides with the rise of a new system of versification in English. Already in Lagamon's Brut, and indeed already in Late Old English, we encounter the rudiments of iambic meter and rhyme. Among all other types of evidence covered so far rhyme evidence is perhaps the least reliable source of information. There is very little indication in the Early Middle English poetic texts, except, perhaps, in the Poema Morale of obligatory adherence to either a masculine or a feminine type of rhymed ' The optionality of the seventh, ninth, eleventh syllable in Early Middle English poetry makes evidence from rhymes very difficult to interpret. Still, while a convincing case in favour of the loss of final -e on the evidence of rhymes cannot be made, we must also dismiss the possibility of arguing that rhyming pairs in which both elements contain the grapheme constitute valid evidence of the preservation of the -e. An early instance of this type of graphically based inferences about the value of -e's in rhyme is found in Morris and Skeat (1898: xxxvii) where the logic and justification for sounding the final -e's rest precisely on the spelling of the rhyming pairs. Examples of pairs in which one of the members has -e and the other one does not are not particularly frequent, a situation which can be attributed both to scribal discipline and perhaps editorial interference. Such pairs do occur, however, even in selected excerpts from Early Middle English texts. In the first 752 lines of the Cotton MS. of The Owl and the Nightingale (Bennett and Smithers 1966: 228) we find the following pairs: Vor harpe an pipe an fugeles songe (259) Mislekef) gif hit is to long (260) 'because a harp, a pipe, and a bird's song displease if they are too long' Vor suich worf) bold 5if f>u fligste (283) fiat wie fio ;if pu vicst (284) 'for such a one becomes bold if you flee that one will flee if you fight' Similarly, in Kyng Alisaunder (thirteenth century, South East, possibly London), we don't have to look far for examples of the same kind. The examples cited here

70 Textual evidence have been taken from the first 328 lines of the poem printed in Bennett and Smithers (1966). Prynce, oiper duk, oiper gret caiser (11) Kni^th, oiöer sweyn, oiper messagere (12) 'Prince, or duke, or great emperor knight, or swain, or messenger' Alle (3e burgeis of pe toun (111) Duden by on red commune (112) 'All the citizens of the town Behaved according to a common plan of action' Rigorous rhyming is a very consistent feature of Genesis and Exodus. Fritzsche (1882: S3) does not mention a single rhyming pair in which the members differ only in the presence or absence of a final -e. A fresh look at the poem generally confirms this conclusion. However, although both editors of the text, Morris (1873) and Arngart (1968), have taken pains to "restore" corrupt rhymes in the notes, none of the following rhymes have been mentioned in either edition: Also he god adde ofte bi-sogte 519 Wislike was him in herte brogt 520 'As he had often prayed to God With wisdom was broght into his heart' Ghe wente agen and bar pat child 985 And abram wurp hire milde 986 'She went again and bore that child And Abraham became gracious to her' But ysaac, is dere childe 1305 He bar pe wude wip herte mild 1306 'But Isaac, his dear child He carried the wood with a mid heart' And abraham pat swerd ut-drog 1327 And was redi to slon him nuge 1328 32 'And Abraham drew that sword And was ready enough to slay him' Dor ise fon he leide in bonde 2693 And he wurp almigtful in pat lond 2694

Rhyme evidence 71 'There his enemies he put in bondage and he became almighty in that land' The significance of the above examples cannot be stretched beyond the assumption that they reflect scribal uncertainty about the precise norms of phonetic realization and graphic shape of the words in rhyming position. As mentioned earlier, this cannot be taken as proof of loss of the final -e; but it cannot be taken as a proof of its preservation either. Given the bulk and weight of evidence from other sources, one can legitimately regard rhyme evidence as either an additional argument for an early dating of this change, or at least neutral regarding its chronology.

3.7. Scribal errors, editorial corrections This type of evidence is generally tacitly overlooked; expansion of abbreviations and tachygraphs is considered a legitimate and common cosmetic operation in editing. Though this source of evidence may be marginal, it may still be the case that the use of special symbols for the final -e is not without significance, especially for a period in the history of the language when spelling was much more "phonetic" than it is today. Abbreviations of frequently occurring words and grapheme combinations was a common practice in Latin. In Old English, too, non-alphabetic symbols were used by the scribes, although never to the extent that they were used in Latin. The most widespread symbols of this kind for Old English were 7 (for "and"), J) (for "that") and a superscribed tilde for a following -n or -m. It is the established policy of modem editors, unless their aim is to produce a paleographically accurate copy of the original, to expand such abbreviations. The practice itself suggests that in editions which are prepared with a view to rendering the text readable to literary and language historians the issue is considered purely mechanical. Since an unstressed vowel is part of the abbreviated material, as in -er, -re, I looked into the the microfilm versions of some manuscripts for a comparison between the edited text and the source. Both editors of The Ormulum, White (1852), and Holt (1878) recognize the use of abbreviations: 7, f>, (tilde) for the nasals, and » for "er" , "ri". No mention is made of emendations concerning the final -e. A reading of the MS Junius I (microfilm, Bodleian Library) does not provide any basis for speculation about the special graphemic status of final -e. All final -e's in this very cramped

72 Textual evidence and untidy manuscript are spelled out very clearly, not just at the beginning but throughout the existing portion of the poem. Since there is only one surviving copy of The Ormulum, one must dismiss the possibility of using this type of graphemic evidence in the study of schwa loss in this particular text The first edition of Genesis and Exodus (Morris 1873), though generally very accurate and reliable, is a good example of what type of editorial interference is likely to occur in printed texts. The scribe of the (only) manuscript, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge 444, uses very few abbreviations, and none that could be relevant in the context of schwa loss. An exception should be allowed, perhaps, for the apostrophe (>) in cases like waP or hung*, where the decision to expand the abbreviation as either -re or -er lies with the editor and has to be made on grammatical, rather than on paléographie grounds; and since the dative/accusative case in the text has fallen together with the nominative, the decision remains arbitrary. Here is a list of examples of editorial corrections, the first part of which is based on Arngart's own collection of emendations (1968: 51-53), and the second on my own collection extracted from Arngart's printed edition: And bar it to her fere ad am (338) Morris And bar it to hire fere adam (MS) 'And carried it to her husband Adam* And wulde to lond canahan (726) Morris And wulde to londe canahan (MS) 'And wanted to go to the land of Canaan' LXXX gere and sexe mo (987) Morris LXXX ger and sexe mo (MS) 'Eighty years and six more' Ghe wurd wif> child, on elde wac (1197) Morris Ghe wurd wi£ childe, on elde wac (MS) 'She became pregnant in feeble age' Rachel adde f>e life for-loren (1886) Morris Rachel adde fie lif for-loren (MS) 'Rachel had lost her life' He bade hise kinde to him charen (2436) Morris He bad hise kinde to him charen (MS) 'He bade his kin to come to him' Such misreadings of the manuscript don't point in the direction of either loss or preservation of final -e. The significance of what is probably a matter of

Scribal errors, editorial corrections

73

mechanical oversights should not be overestimated; they can, however, be some measure of indication of the underlying editorial assumptions about the "correctness" of a given form, they can also alert us to the type of "mistake" a scribe was likely to make. The following are some of Morris' corrections of the manuscript in the first edition of Genesis and Exodus: pat euere sprang in werld [e] wid (60) 'that ever sprang in the wide world' And tuderande on werld [e] ben (164) 'And are proliferating in the world' Quo seide fie dat gu wer [e] naked (359) 'Who told you that you were naked?' Sum was wip migt [e] so forp-gon (835) 'Some had progressed so far with power' wip michel welpe in good [e] sael (928) 'with much wealth in good time' His good [e] wil was hem good mei (1020) 'His good will was to them a good meal' The square brackets indicate editorial additions. Taken in isolation, the absolute number of these emendations is not very impressive; yet any exhaustive coverage of the textual evidence for the loss of -e should include scribal "errors". They, too, bear witness to the phonetic instability of the final schwa and the uncertainty with which it was handled by the scribes. On the basis of an apparent slip of the pen of the type: Pat burge an-oper man lip on (812) 'That city belongs to another man' where man is the MS reading for what Arngart correctly infers from the context to stand for nam 'name' we could imagine the following justification: the noun name, although it is hardly ever written without the final in Middle English, could already be treated as a monosyllable. In this particular instance the scribal error corroborates the conclusions based on metrical treatment and "regular" graphic loss of -e in other t e x t s . While The Ormulum and Genesis and Exodus use no special abbreviations for final -e, other manuscripts contain tachygraphic signs which can be interpreted as a final -e. Smithers (1952-1957: xii), commenting on the editorial policy of the MS Laud Misc. 622 of Kyng Alisaunder, describes the following difficulty: "It is not

74 Textual evidence easy to make out whether the horizontal line that scribes wrote through the loop of / and h (when these follow another consonant and stand at the end of a word) was intended as an abbreviation or had become a meaningless flourish." The procedure adopted by the editor in this case is typical of many other editions with silent expansions of tachygraphs: the horizontal line through I has been expanded as -e, but the line through A has been ignored. Also, a horizontal line over -pp or ρ following another consonant (at the end of a word) has been resolved as -e. As Smithers himself admits (1952-1957: xii) "the procedure is no doubt arbitrary". The practice of increased use of abbreviations in the manuscripts in later Middle English is parallel to some extent to the growing uncertainty in the phonetic and graphic status of fìnal -e. Before the first half of the thirteenth century such abbreviations are rare. Tolkien's almost diplomatic edition of the MS Corpus Christi College Cambridge 402 (The Ancrene Wisse, West Midlands, 1230-1250), shows no interesting examples of the type discussed for Kyng Alisaunder, which is early fourteenth century. Abbreviations, expanded by Tolkien without italics (Tolkien 1962: VI), are mostly due to the Latin associations of the text. Two other Southern manuscripts of the early fourteenth century illustrate scribal tampering and perhaps discomfort with the final -es in the language. In Dan Michael's Ayenbite of Inwyt (Kent, 1300-1340) "A final -e has sometimes been restored by the corrector [the manuscript has been corrected with great care by the author] as in: huanne (36/34), uele opre (40/9), yeflbe of (42/31), zenne him (51/18), ssole yzi (96/33), oure herten (98/19), pe ilke orible bosyne (137/22), more ynog (137/28), pane oprene (180/18) and guodness is corrected to guodnesse [is] nineteen times" (Gradon 1979: 52).^4 In the introduction to the facsimile edition of the text of the Ms Harley 2253 of the British Museum (1320-1340, Herefordshire) Ker (1965: xix-xx) writes: Two marks of suspension, a horizontal stroke through final -h and a downward loop attached to final -k, cause editorial difficulty ... They occur both in words where no abbreviation can be intended, ... and in words where one would expect a final -e . This sort of ambiguity was fostered, no doubt, by the writing of Latin documents containing English personal names and place names. Scribes writing these names added to the final letter a mark of suspension which suggests rather than stands for a Latin case-ending. It is a very small further step to use the mark with no meaning when writing French or English!

Scribal errors, editorial corrections 75 In summary, there is no strong positive paléographie evidence for the different treatment of -e in spelling up to the end of the thirteenth century. Uncertainty in the graphic shape of -e is attested much more frequently in later documents. This situation cannot be attributed to the Latin tradition alone; it must also be related to the growing discrepancy between the spoken form of the language and the prescribed spelling norm. My observations about the chronological parallel between the advanced loss of -e and the increased occurrence of abbreviations for e are based on a limited body of texts. The sample should be representative of the practices of the period as a whole, but obviously there is room for more work along these lines. It is, after all, of considerable linguistic consequence whether , ' , or ) after a consonant in a manuscript should be interpreted as a consonant followed by / a / , or as a consonant followed by a meaningless flourish of the pen.

3.8. Graphically unmarked evidence

In addition to the actual written testimony described in 3.3 - 3.7, arguments about the loss of final -e in Middle English have traditionally been based on poetic scansion. The interpretation of this type of evidence requires extreme caution: poetic conventions are based on available linguistic features, which, though present in the language, may not necessarily be central or frequent in the system. The poetic models and constraints for the period of schwa loss are still being studied; the rules of the embryonic accentual-syllabic versification are believed to have been imperfectly understood and applied, and therefore subject to considerable flexibility in the number of stresses and syllables per line. Stress patterns throughout Middle English were also in a state of flux; the residual secondary stress in compounds and derivatives could still coincide with the ictic position, and words of Romance origin could either preserve their original accent, or be assimilated to the native system. Yet instances of schwa loss which fall under the rubric of graphically unmarked evidence are, by general consent, plentiful from very early times. As noted already in connection with poetic elision, Sweet (1922: §374) regarded this as a definite possibility in Beowulf. Such observations cannot be carried beyond what seems to be a strong scholarly intuition about some features of Old English speech: in alliterative meter, the only metrical source for that period, the number of unstressed syllables is unconstrained and essentially irrelevant for the metricality of a line. Moving into Middle English, however, allows us to analyze

76 Textual evidence poetic texts of the twelfth and the thirteenth century composed in a different poetic tradition, where, in spite of possible violations, an overall pattern of regularity (number of syllables per line) can and must be assumed. The rest of this section covers evidence from poetry which is based on assumptions of what we see as the proper scansion to render lines metrical, rather than on graphic attestation of loss of schwa. The basic meter of Poema Morale (here quoted from the MS Lambeth 487, composed c. 1150, South Midlands, Hampshire?) is seven-foot rhymed couplets, with caesura after the fourth foot, see also notes 18 and 31. Elision, as well as syncope of -e-, occur frequently in the text (Mossé 1952: 342): Ich 'em I nu 'aid I er 'pene I ich 'wes, II a 'win I trë 'ent I a 'larë (1) Ί am now older than I was in years and in knowledge' Un I net 'lif I ich Tiabb I e i-'led II ent 'get I me 'pingfj I i 'lede (5) 'Useless life I have led, and still methinks I lead' In line 1 the vertical lines follow Mossé's divisions in his notes on versification in the poem; I have provided the foot divisions for line 5. Apostrophes mark the ictic positions. The number of unstressed syllables within a single foot can vary, but only at line edges and generally in the direction of loss of the non-ictic part of the foot. The normal pattern is an iambic foot, but initially and after the caesura the unstressed syllable may be missing. Mossé mentions also the possibility of trisyllabic feet, as a rule at the end of the line, but some of his examples may be interpreted as disyllabic feet if we allow for syncopation of an unstressed vowel followed by a liquid, as in Icumen in\. Some lines allow alternative scanning, but this does not invalidate the general statement that elision is most likely to occur before vowels: Al to 'lom« ich 'habbe i-gult II a 'werke 'ent o 'worde (27) 'All too frequently I have sinned in works and in words' be 'def) his 'echte on 'sikere 'studejl he hit 'sent to 'hevene 'riche (42) 'he who puts his property in a secure place, he sends it to the kingdom of heaven' In line (42) all italicized -e's can be elided or syncopated in at least one acceptable scanning. Indeed, in the first 56 lines of the poem printed in Mossé, I have counted an average of one elidable final -e per line. The metrical "silencing" of -e doesn't always require an elision environment. In line (41) below: pes 'riche |men 'welnep bon Isiker II purh wallle ent Ipurh diche (41) 'these rich men expect to be secure, through wall and through ditch'

Graphically unmarked evidence

77

the boldfaced -e in riche was probably elided, while the -e in walle must count as a separate syllable in spite of the vocalic environment. This is an illustration of a phenomenon so pervasive in Middle English accentual-syllabic poetry that it represents an important argument in estimates of the phonological status and behavior of -e. Lagamon's Brut (here quoted from MS Cotton Caligula A IX, c. 1205, West Midlands, Worcestershire) follows a metrical structure based on alliterative half-lines, often linked in rhyme, with a mixture of different syllabic meters (Lewis, 1963: xxiii-xiv), makes the evidence here less reliable than that in the more strie accentual-syllabic meters, see section 3.5.2, and notes 29 and 30. There are, however, isosyllabic half-lines in which elision is to be assumed. Mossé (1952: 21) gives the following two examples: 'ArSur 'lay allí 'longe 'niht and 'spac wif> 'pene 'geonge 'cniht (14001) 'All night long Arthur stayed talking with the young knight' where the half-lines have four feet and: "Longe 'bip 'severe 'fìat no 'wene ich 'navere (14062) 'As long as time shall last, I will never believe'^ with half-lines comprising three feet The italicized-e's are marked as "elided" by Mossé, and though one could argue that elision is not absolutely obligatory, it is certainly possible and quite common. Another metrical composition which can be searched for evidence of schwa loss is The Owl and the Nightingale, here quoted from MS Cotton Caligula A. IX in the British Museum, composed between 1189 and 1216, possibly Surrey. The metrical regularity of this poem is quite remarkable both in terms of number of syllables per line, and in correspondences between stress and ictic position. As mentioned in section 3.2.2.2 above, over 70% of the lines in the poem are octosyllabic (Tarlinskaya 1971: 78), and although different scholars allow for a different degree of freedom in the line composition (for a good summary of the issues see Stanley (1960: 35)), the regularity of pre-vocalic and pre -A- elision of a final -e is generally agreed upon. The first six lines of the poem will be sufficient to illustrate this point: Ich was in one sumere dale In one supe ditele hale

1

78 Textual evidence I herde ich holde grete tale An Hule and one Ni^tingale. pat plait was stif 7 stare 7 strong Sum wile softe 7 lud among.

5

Ί was in a dale one summer In one extremely hidden part I heard holding a great dispute An owl and a nightingale. That debate was keen, strenuous, and strong Sometimes quiet and sometimes loud.' Ignoring the possibility of line-final -e's being silent, a recurring option and an unsolvable problem for poetry up to and including Chaucer, we can elide the underlined -e's in the passage above (either one of them in lines (1) and (2), or even both of them in (6), and retain perfect scansion. In fact, elision in (3), (4), and in softe in (6) appears obligatory. Note also the graphically marked elision in lud in (6).

This brief survey of elision in the earliest Middle English poetic texts would be incomplete without a note on The Ormulum. It has already been mentioned that this is an absolutely vintage text with respect to elision. It is composed in a perfectly consistent and unvarying septenarius, with a pause after the fourth foot, 15 syllables to a line, all lines with an iambic opening, each stressed syllable flanked by one and only one unstressed syllable. I have not been able to discover a single unmetrical line in the whole poem. The septenarius is borrowed from Latin versification; religious adherence to the original model may account for the absolute regularity in the number of syllables. Elision in The Ormulum. is obligatory — this is probably why this particular aspect of the poem has been ignored in the description of the state of the final vowels in iL This is true only of polysyllables, of course, we cannot expect elision in cases like he iss, gho itt, he aid etc., see also White (1852: lxxx). Here are a couple of half lines illustrating the phenomenon: Well swipe sari offdredde (H 3809) 'Very sorely frightened' Well swipe offdredde waerenn (H 3813) 'Were frightened very much' Drihhtin to lofe annd wurrpe (H 3375) 'The Lord to praise and glorify'

Graphically unmarked evidence

79

God herrte and god wille (H 3383) 'Godd heart and always good will' fjatt dide he forr to shaewenn swa (H 3612) 'That he did in order to show thus* Swa-summ itt waere of moderr (H 3655) 'As if it were from mother' These examples were selected randomly; only half-lines have been quoted. Elision does not depend on syllable length or syllable composition. There seems to be no correlation between elision and word class, i.e. elision is governed by phonetic environment and is not comparable to the pattern emerging from the study of graphically marked cases of elision and loss with nouns, adjectives and adverbs (Lehnert: 1953). It can affect all word classes alike; non-major word classes such as prepositions and conjunctions are not exempt from it. The fact that graphically marked loss is more regular with certain morphological patterns, while prevocalic elision is ubiquitous, suggests that we are dealing with factors which produce identical results in the case of inflected classes. One can assume that phonological elision is the earlier, and more general process. Inflexional loss is a subset of all possible cases of elided schwas. At the same time inflexional loss is strengthened in non-eliding environments for rhythmic and functional reasons, and thus it appears that loss of -e is graphically "legitimized" first in nouns, and only later in other word classes. Finally, metric loss of final -e can occur in segmental environments other than those defined as causing elision. In The Ormulum such loss is normally graphically marked. In the whole of this poem there are only three examples (H 3725, H 4177, and H 6632) where a graphic final -e must be silent before a word beginning with a consonant without violating the meter. No real significance can be attached to these cases; since the existing editions do not list folio numbers it would be very time consuming to collate the text with the manuscript. Until we are positive that these lines represent the correct readings we can assume that in addition to his other idiosyncrasies, the scribe of The Ormulum followed a rule of writing out metrically superfluous -e's only in elision environments. This practice cannot be taken as generalized and accepted by scribes recording verse compositions in Middle English. In other early poems of the period the final -e can be silent before consonants: Thus within only 30 lines of The Owl and the Nightingale we find: Vor 'wane pu 'sittest 'on pine 'rise 'for when you sit on your elevation*

894

80 Textual evidence par "hit is 'muchele 'more 'neode? where it is much more needed'

906

Of 'songe pat 'is bi'neoSe pe sunne *bf song that is beneath the sun'

912

Ac ich 'fare bope 'norp and 'sup 'But I travel both North and South'

921

Such examples are plentiful, and although cases of elision outnumber the cases of metrically silent -e's in other environments, the phenomenon is sufficiently widespread to suggest that the language allowed considerable freedom in the metrical, if not necessarily graphic treatment of final unstressed vowels. The Poema Morale, too, seems to allow for silent -e's in non-elision environments: For per we hit michte finden eft II ent habben buten ende (52) 'For there we can find it again, and have it without end' pe pet echte wile halden wel II hwile pe he mu^e es weiden (55) 'He that intends to hold property well while he can wield it' jive hies for Godes luve II penne dep hes wel i-halden (56) 'let him give of it for the love of God, then is death well managed' Unlike the less controversial phenomenon of elision, cases like the ones cited above have elicited a variety of individual interpretations of "regularity" and "metricality". Basil Cottle's review of Arngart's edition of Genesis and Exodus (1971: 165) is quite characteristic of the way in which experts can differ on the point of scansion. The relationship between the assumed metrical canon and the linguistic features of Early Middle English remains an interesting and challenging field of inquiry. Recent theoretical advances in metrics and phonological theory provide a promising framework for the study of these issues.

Notes Chapter 3. Textual evidence

1. For Middle English this issue was discussed comprehensively by Stockwell (1952: 6ff), McLaughlin (1963: Chapter 2). 2. Some information on this point is available in the new Middle English Dialect Dictionary. 3. The assumption of an internalized metrical grammar, a set of basic acceptability rules for a "metrical" line, which exists parallel to the internalized grammar of the poet's language avoids the circularity of the meter versus language issue. This argument is developed in Minkova (1990). 4. From King Horn (443-444). Mossé (1952: 359) assumes that both boldfaced e's are silent, but that is only one way of making the line metrical, i.e. having three accents. At this point I will not discuss the stress shift on hire or swogning which alternative scansions would involve; I just point out that non-root stressing is an accepted practice in Middle English versification. 5. Dahl's analytical techniques are quite simple: he just scans the selected texts for instances of "fluctuation", "incongriuty", and, additionally, "distinction", which stands for preservation, in writing, of the expected pattern. His udy falls short of his declared goal of solving the issue of the priority of function over form in the loss of inflexions in English. He presents a huge bulk of valuable material, far too much of the same thing, in fact, and fails to develop an interesting interpretation. The reader is left with the conviction, which he or she may have had before, in any case, that "fluctuation" and "incongruity" did indeed exist from the ninth century onwards. The amount of almost identical material piled up to make this one point is unnecessarily repetitive, which does not detract from the usefulness of the data collected by Dahl for my account. 6. The example is from the tenth century, from a Grant by King Edgar, Early Yorkshire Charter (Dahl 1936: 15). It should be noted that the first noun, OE sacu 'jurisdiction in litigious suits' preserves its form elsewhere, e.g. ne sace ne socne 'neither your privileges, nor your rights' (Bosworth and Toller 1989 [1983]: 894). 7. A total of 32 records preserved in the Exeter Book, The Sermo in Festis S. Mariœ, and the Passio Jacobi Minoris. 8. The quotations are taken mostly from Plummer's edition, but Dahl has also used the MS Bodleian Laud Misc. 6363 for cross-references (Dahl 1936:41).

82 Textual evidence 9. Some of the material presented here was first published in Minkova (1978). 10. Standard textbooks unanimously list bishop as an item resisting the tendency towards weakening of the final unstressed syllable (Luick 1921-1940: §440), Jordan (1934-1968: §136.2). Both bishop and myrra may have resisted weakening because they belong to a specific register and were still unassimilated; the second syllable in these items could have constituted an independent foot and thus would not undergo phonetic weakening Alternatively, the preservation may be simply scribal. Drihhtin can probably be explained as analogical, the substantival suffix in this text appears regularly as -inng, e.g.: addlinng, clapinng, egginng, etc. For the regularity in the spelling of such forms see Luick (1921-1940: §327), Jordan (1934-1968: §174). The graphemic system of the unstressed vowels in compound words, as well as of those in various derivational affixes, does not differ in any way from that used for the vowels bearing primary stress. The graphemes , , , , , , are used to represent the vowels in stressed position. All of these, except the allograph , are preserved in compounds and in derivational prefixes and suffixes, as in: inn-, unn-, onn-, a-, -inng, -linng, had, -warrd, -laess, -summ, -full, -wurrp, -mod, -dom etc. so, the text provides no basis for speculation about the degree of reduction in this position. In this respect The Ormulum may serve as a confirmation of Luick's statement (19211940: § 456) that "in slow speech — namely poetic presentation, both the original secondary stress and the unstressed syllable remained unchanged." Björkman (1913: 381) suggests that "Orm did not write the way he spoke, he wrote the way he believed one should speak." On this point see also Dickins and Wilson (1951: 82). 11. The septenarius, in which each foot is disyllabic, consisting of only one stressed and only one unstressed syllable, with every full line ending in an unstressed syllable. 12. As in the first two lines of the Dedication: Nu, broperr Wallterr, broperr min Aîiterr Jje flaeshess kinde... 'Now brother Walter, brother mine After the nature of the flesh' The metrical treatment of such forms in Middle English verse is discussed by Luick (1914-1921: § 456.2 Anm. 2).

Notes 83 13. This distinction, too, can be eliminated by elision. Lehnert (1953: 62) quotes the following examples with the plural of the noun sip : "Well offte sip e onn erpe" D 228, with elision [DM], and "Off pa twa si fie twellfe menn"... H 537, where the -e plural must be sounded. 14. The presentation of the textual evidence follows roughly the selection and arrangement of texts in Dahl (1936). I will not include examples appearing in his 30 page survey of the same type of loss in the A and Β versions of Lagamons Brut·, the source is too close in date and dialect to the Ancrene Riwle, which has the additional advantage of being a prose text. 15. The last three pairs could also be analyzed as instances of elision — coincidentally — since morphosyntactic loss does not depend on elision, neither is elision confined to morphologically significant -e's. 16. All quotes from Genesis and Exodus are from the edition by Amgart (1968). 17. The examples are only a record of the textual findings; it is possible to argue that such instances should be considered real scribal errors, which constitute a separate argument, but do not invalidate the claim that schwa was unstablethe issue will be discussed again in Chapter Five. 18. The text used for the count is printed in Hall (1920: 30:54), based on the Lambeth MS 487, with references to British Museum Egerton MS 613, Trinity Coll. Cambridge B. 14. 52. The two manuscripts show no difference with respect to the writing of the final -e. The deletion in question appears in "mest all pet", where al is a partitive genitive cf. Mitchell (1985: § 188), which by 1200 this may have become undeclinable within the phrase, compare Modern English most people and most of the people. 19. The text used is the British Museum Cotton Calligula A. ix, prited in Hall (1920: 149-176) 20. In the field of English historical phonology the recent study of lexical diffusion of some diachronic phonological changes of the stressed vowels by Ogura (1987) is an impressive example of a statistical study of this kind. I am not aware of comparable attempts in the area of schwa reduction and loss. 21. This example and the list below have been extracted and compiled from the Ormulum coverage in Dahl (1936: 50-61). 22. The examples are arranged according to their gender in Old English, and not alphabetically, following Lehnert (1953: 21-23). 23. This pair of examples may also reflect the Old English variation between will, which can be a neuter noun, and willa, masculine. 24. Possible contamination from the plural, but the Latin has the singular vir eius (Mossé 1952: 345)

84 Textual evidence 25. In Old English noun list 'craft, cunning' can be either masculine or feminine. 26. Both in the examples cited here, and in some of the examples below in which the unetymological -e appears in adverbs we must also allow the possibility of analogical extension of -e which is the standard adverbial derivational morpheme of the period. 27. More detailed data on this point is presented in Minkova 1978. 28. The square brackets are editorial, Morris' modification of MS sono (Arngart 1968: 83). 29. Worcestershire, first quarter of the thirteenth century for the A text, and fifty years later for the Β text. 30. The issue of the interrelation between the alliteartive and the non-alliterative portions of this poem and the value of the final -e's in them has no easy solution. My study does not address the potential evidence for loss or preservation of final -e in Middle English alliterative compositions. For recent arguments concerning the phonetic value of final -e and its relation to the structure of the Middle English alliterative line the reader is referred to Cable (1990) and Duggan (1988,1990). 31. The meter of the Poema Morale is a rhymed septenarius. The last ictus in every line of the poem is invariably on what looks like the penultimate syllable, the final syllable being spelled -e, -en, -ye, -er, -es, etc. The frequency of rhymes ending in -e is incomparably higher than that that of other rhymes, see e.g. the selection in Mossé (1952: 136-139) where only three out of twenty three rhyming pairs do not involve -e. Thus the argument for feminine rhymes here can be as circular as the arguments about Chaucer's final -e's in rhyme. Notice also ilom: dome (125), in Morris (1867) where the omission of-e in Horn is considered a scribal error by the editor, or Home : come (329-330) in the Trinity Ms. (Hall 1920: 49), with -e in ilome supplied by the editor. 32. nuge = now (Morris 1873). Arngart (1968) interprets the forms as "enough". 33. We have seen that in The Ormulum final -e is optional depending on meter; scribal treatment of the vowel confirms further this observation. "In the two instances of the half line god heorrte annd agg god wille (H 3383 and Η 3929) gode was originally written for the second god; but it was corrected to god, and agg was inserted to give the extra syllable needed. The same was done in lines Η 3955 and Η 3969: annd habbenn agg god wille. Satt hafeS agg god wille, and it was clearly by an oversight that line Η 3967 still reads Satt hafeöö gode wille" (Bennett and Smithers 1966: xxvi). 34. It is of no consequence for this section that some of the examples quoted here are evidently also instantiations of elision. "Elision of a final vowel before a

Notes 85 following vowel or h- is common in the text, for example bot a for bote a (72/2), yefp of for yefpe of (144/27), clen and for clene and (159/13) etc." (Gradon 1979: 52). 35. The translations are from Barron and Weinberg (1989: 239,243).

Chapter 4 Phonological aspects of schwa loss

4.1. The phonemic status of schwa in Middle English^

This chapter concentrates on the linguistic entity represented by -e in Middle English in relation to the overall phonological system of the period. Traditionally the properties and functions of one linguistic unit are described with reference to other units of the same order. This approach to language analysis has produced useful insights in descriptions of both synchronic and diachronic systems. An analysis of the way in which Middle English schwa may have been perceived by the speakers of Middle English may prove revealing in terms of its function and subsequent developments. The textual evidence for presence or loss of -e in Middle English as described in the previous chapter is far from consistent or straightforward, not easily susceptible to frequency counts. The absence of strong, or even tangible, empirical basis may be one reason why textbooks, prefaces to text editions, and even specialized phonological papers have avoided the issue of which phonological analysis would cover the data most plausibly. The paucity of phonemic or phonological references is not surprising also from the point of view of the gap between traditional philological description and the linguistic goal of interpretation and explanation of the data. This gap has been and is being bridged successfully in the more popular areas of stressed vocalism, or consonantal history, but very little has been done to remedy the situation in reference to the unstressed vowels. While phonologists have been concerned with the classification and the assignment of phonemic status to the unstressed vowels in Modern English and in some other Germanic languages, the historical perspective of the same problem remains largely untouched.2 Comparatively exhaustive descriptive accounts of developments in the unstressed syllables, such as Luick (1921-1940) and Jordan (1968 [1934]) do not concern themselves with the phonemic status of final -e in Middle English. A more recent, extensive, and very detailed survey of the unstressed vocalism in Middle English, that by Berndt (1960), is not phonemically oriented either.

88 Phonological aspects of schwa loss The discussion in this section is limited to vowels in final syllables and in absolutely final position. This is the position in which, historically, vowels are subject to apocope between 1100 and 1400. Cases of syncope and ocurrences of nonfinal schwas will not be treated here. Cases of syncope undoubtedly exist during the same period but they present a separate problem. Another set of issues is related to the behavior of vowels in pre-tonic syllables, or of vowels in the unstressed syllables of polysyllabic stems producing possible instances of wordinternal morphophonemic alternation where a reduced vowel in one form corresponds to a full vowel in another. In phonetic terms the degree of reduction of unstressed vowels varies depending on whether they appear in syllables preceding or following the tonic/stressed syllable. A common observation across languages is that there is a "widespread tendency for weakening of the pronunciation from the beginning of the word towards its end".3 For Modem English the recognition of this tendency is implicit in the treatment of the unstressed vowels in Gimson (1970: 146). Bolinger (1981: 9) distinguishes between two types of reduction, "stable" and "unstable", depending on the position of the unstressed vowel. "Stable reduction is typically found in final syllables ... it is also in the final syllables that reduction tends to stabilize most quickly ... In other positions, reduction is less stable and one may be able to speak of alternations ... where this wavering is most noticeable is in initial, immediately pretonic position" (Bolinger 1981: 9)/* The first explicit diachronic treatment of the phonemic status of schwa in English is developed in Vachek (1964). Drawing attention to the great complexity of this issue, Vachek discusses the origin of the phonematic status of schwa, "the short mixed vowel" in Early Modern English (1976: 258-259). The inference from his analysis is that in Middle English [a] should be analysed as an allophone of one of the short vowels, perhaps the short /e/, which is also the prephonemic theory assumption in Luick (1921-1940: §§ 589 ff). As noted in Chapter 2, Fisiak (1970: 40) includes schwa as an independent entry in the system of the short vowel phonems of Middle English without commenting further on his choice. Magnusson (1971: 150) does not include [a] in his short monophthongal subsystem and presents some arguments for treating it as the unstressed allophone of the short/lax low mid front vowel /ε/, compare also his later comments on the same issue (Magnusson 1974: 123-124). He objects to assigning an independent phonemic status to schwa "because it is not likely that the unstressed syllables should have greater possibilities of phonematic contrasts than stressed ones..." (Magnusson 1971: 160).

The phonemic status of schwa in Middle English 89 These proposals are based on accounts of the loss of the final unstressed vowel in Middle English which generally agree on two points: (1) In Late Old English, i.e. after the beginning of the tenth century, the vocalic oppositions surviving in final unstressed syllables were limited to /e/ : loi : /a/ (Luick 1921-1940: §350, Campbell 1959: §368). Luick describes the qualitative changes of the vowels in unstressed position in terms of a Lautverschiebung (1921-1940: § 322). High and/or rounded unstressed vowels are lowered and unrounded.^ In addition to absence of stress, vowel reduction must also be seen as a function of the morphemic status of the final syllable. Thus "formative" elements, derivational morphemes such as - ig, -ic, - isc, - ing, - iht, - lie, etc. "are generally not subject to the change of i to s " (Campbell 1959: §371). The reduction of full vowels in final syllables described here affects only short vowels; the short/long opposition in unaccented syllables had been lost in West Germanic (Campbell 1959: §331.5). (2) Towards the end of the Old English period, i.e. after the beginning of the eleventh century, more and more graphemic differences begin to disappear, a fact suggesting progressive neutralization of phonemes occurring in this position. The lack of phonemic distinctiveness apparently underlies the replacement of the old graphemes by . The appearance of this grapheme in practically all post-tonic positions is interpreted as a graphic reflex of what, in phonetic terms, would be a reduction of the respective vowels, and in phonemic terms - a structure determined neutralization - a case of suspended opposition due to lack of stress. Thus English sees the advent of the schwa, the reduced, mid, central, murmured, mixed, indeterminate, colorless vowel, whose "neutrality" has been branded, by one school of language historians, as a defect responsible for some of the most drastic grammatical changes in the history of the language, the decrease of the number of distinctive inflexions in Middle English. Although it seems fairly obvious that the terms "reduction" and "neutralization" refer to two different aspects of this sound change, they have been, and still are, used indiscriminately in outlines of the history of schwa. Reduction as used here is a cover term for the phonetic process resulting from the application of less physiological energy applied to the production of a particular

90 Phonological aspects of schwa loss sound.6 In English phonetic reduction is associated with absence of stress, either within the word, or within the boundaries of a syntactic phrase.7 Neutralization, on the other hand, a linguistically significant, functionally defined phonemic process, is the loss of meaningful distinctions within a set of two or more phonemes.** Neutralization can be the result of phonetic reduction but does not necessarily follow from it. Reduction can occur without causing neutralization; in the system of unstressed vowels in Modern English this state of things would be illustrated by minimal pairs of the effect - affect type. Neutralization is not always the consequence of reduction, cf. the pre-nasal neutralization of /e/ and /i/ in some dialects of English. In the history of schwa the two processes are concomitant, yet the distinction between reduction and neutralization remains very important in the phonemic identification procedure which is the object of this section.^ The points mentioned in (1) and (2) exhaust the areas in which scholars have reached some agreement. Attempts at defining the chronology with greater precision run into problems and are treated differently by different authors; the same is true of the opinions on the various factors causing neutralization and loss of the vowel. On the one hand, the process has been attributed to functional insufficiency, leading to redundancy of the respective morphological form (Horn and Lehnert 1954, Lehnert 1957), on the other, it has been described as the consequence of an important phonological development, progressive concentration of stress on the first non-prefixal syllable (Mossé 1952 [1968]: §34, Bemdt 1960: 115). Smirnitski (1951) regards the phonological and the morphological developments as not necessarily related to one another. A vague interaction between the processes of phonetic reduction, phonological neutralization, and the decay of the morphological system is the view that most histories of the English language of the last couple of decades would subscribe to, see for example Millward (1989: 133, 141-142). In spite of Smirnitski's attempt to provide an isolative account for the phonetic and the morphological processes the interactive nature of the change at some post-initiation stage can be taken as axiomatic. At the same time a focus on the conditions and specific manifestations of reduction, neutralization, and morphologization will sharpen our understanding of the process as a whole. The two questions to be addressed in this chapter are the following: Was schwa a phoneme in Middle English? What were the phonetic properties of schwa which made its special behavior possible?

The Middle English phonemic inventory 91

4.2. The Middle English phonemic inventory

In a basic phonemic framework our first task should be to take stock of the exisiting phonemic oppositions in the language under scrutiny. An idealized and generalized phonemic inventory of the short vowel system for Middle English (1150 to 1400), including possible early dialectal survivals of front rounded vowels as independent phonemes, may be represented in the following way: ^ /i/(/y/)

Μ

Ie/(j0f)

loi Ν

/a/ The implications of this table are clear: schwa is assumed to have had phonemic status, so it has "distinctiveness", or "meaning-differentiating function". ** For identification and a complete characterization of the vowel spelt in Middle English we will look at: (1) the network of phonemic contrasts in which it participates, (2) its distribution within that network, and (3) its phonetic range. These points are based on Trubetzkoy's practical rules for setting up a phoneme inventory, and serve to distinguish between cases in which different sounds are variants of the same phoneme, and cases in which they are distinct phonemes. The procedures and the criteria used for this operation are familiar, here summarized from Fisher-j0rgensen (1975: 3.4): (1) If two sounds in the same environment may be interchanged without a change of meaning, they are facultative variants of the same phoneme. (2) If they cannot be interchanged without altering the meaning or making the word unrecognizable they are realizations of two different phonemes. (3) If two articulatorily and acoustically related sounds never occur in the same environment they are combinatory variants of the same phoneme. Tests (1) and (2) should be applicable to the diachronic material presented in the previous chapter. The articulatory and acoustic judgements required for (3) can only be based on typology and will have to remain speculative.

92 Phonological aspects of schwa loss 4.2.1. The phonemic contrasts Speculations about the phonemic contrasts in Middle English are based on material which is exclusively graphic; given that limitation we can define "contrast" or "opposition" as the assumed difference between the sounds represented consistently with different graphemes in the manuscripts. The only spelling contrast found in Early Middle English in unaccented final position is that between and . The spelling can, from very early on, be phonetically empty, or, it can stand for a vocalic segment, broadly referred to as schwa [a]. The spellings with are traditionally taken as covering phonic material of roughly the range of the lax high front unrounded [t] to the high central unrounded [i]. In order to establish whether differentiation of meaning is a property of these segments, I follow the time honored procedure of looking for minimal pairs. The relevance of such pairs in setting up a phonemic inventory is uncontroversial - this test requires the existence in the language of pairs of semantically different words in which the sounds in question appear in otherwise identical phonetic environments, e.g. Modem English pin vs. bin vs. sin vs. tin vs. din, or tan vs. tin vs. ton vs. ten etc. The interpretation of the phrase "same environments" in the definition of the minimal pair test will have to be left rather broad at times in view of the scarcity and nature of the source material. Ideally, what is required is absolute phonetic identity of the members of the pair except for the contrasting segments in them; ideally, too, the two members of a minimal pair should belong to the same word class and thus stand the chance of appearing in the same syntactic context, so that disambiguation would rest entirely with the categorization of the sound. Accidental gaps in the system, as well as distributional constraints of some phonemes would, however, provide justification for relaxing the stipulation for absolute identity of phonetic and syntactic environments.^ 4. 2. 2. Minimal pairs in Middle English Although not overwhelmingly numerous, and certainly not always ideal, minimal pairs involving final unstressed vowels can be found in Middle English. This section starts with a sampling of the type of data available in four t e x t s : ^

The Middle English phonemic inventory 93 Genesis and Exodus, c. 1250: bere η. 'bier' (2841), also bere v. imp. 'carry* (3513): beri(es) n. 'berry'; bode n. 'message' (395 etc.): bodi n. 'body' (4055 etc.); gredde v. 'cried out' (3585): gredi a. 'greedy' (947, 1494); hali a. 'holy' (54), also ali (494,517,1486 &c.): halle 'all' (2340), also alle (318, 896 2342 &c); helle η. 'hell' (85 &c.): heli a.,var. of hali. 'holy' (51); manne n. 'to the man' (366): mani a. 'many' (2662, 3308); se le η. 'time' (1537 &c.): seli a. 'happy' (31 &c.); were n. 'man, protecor', also war (367, 2680, 1788 &c.): weri a. 'weary' (975, 1493); wurde v. 'become' (272,634 &c.): wurdi a. 'worthy' (1012,3753). Sir Orfeo, c. 1250-1330: bere v. 'carry" (309 Ashm.): bery(s) n. 'berry' (260 Ashm.); bope 'both* (86 Ashm.): bodi 'body' (54 Ashm.); rede adj. 'red' (362 Auch.): redi adj. 'ready' (380 Auch.); sore n. 'sorrow' (560 Auch.): sori adj. 'sorry' (458 Auch.). The Owl and the Nightingale, first half of the thirteenth century: ene adv. 'once' (1107): eni adj. 'any' (557,708 &c.); hole adj. 'hollow' (965): holi adj. 'holy* (721,1382); note n. 'need,use' (330,557,1034,122): noti v. 'put to use' (1033), also not v. 'does not know' (1180, 1181 &c.); mode n. 'mood' (517 &c.): modi adj. 'bold' (500); sore adj. 'severe' (1472): sori adj. 'sorry' (994); sope adj. 'truthful' (698): so ti adj. 'sooty' (578); wite v. 'blame' (1248): witi adj. 'wise' (1189). The Destruction of Troy, end of 14 c.: crafte n. 'skill' (125 &c.): crafty adj. 'well matched' (1644); dule n. 'devil' (921 &c.): duly adv. 'truly* (60 &c.); heve v. 'heave' (4603 &c.): hevy adj. 'heavy' (5567 &c.): sore n. 'wound' (9193 &c.) sory adj. 'sorry* (4467 &c.). The relevance of minimal pairs for setting up a phonemic inventory is unquestionable: "the phonemic inventory of a language is actually only a corollary of the system of distinctive oppositions" (Trubetzkoy 1939 [1969]: 67). Yet disambiguation is not carried out exclusively on the level of distinctive oppositions between and within the individual segments. The clues that a hearer will use in the interpretation of meaning can come from every level of linguistic and even non-linguistic communication. The selection of minimal pairs cited from

94 Phonological aspects of schwa loss the four texts above are not textbook perfect. Clearly most of them exist by virtue of the preservation of the distinctiveness of the Old English suffix -ϊξ, where the vocalization of the palatal glide and the subsequent shortening (for some varieties of English) of the resulting high front vowel or diphthong happened too late for it to share in the general neutralization of unstressed vowels in final position characteristic of the developments at earlier periods. ^ The morphological autonomy of {-y/i} in words like body, many, merry, ready etc. after 1200 is a separate issue. It is reasonable to assume that a certain degree of morphological non-tansparency had already affected the morpheme in some lexical items, such as many, merry, ready, in which the root is not perceived as independent, but not in others, e.g. crafty, heavy, sorry. One could argue then that a surface opposition is realized under specific grammatical conditions, but this would not be true of all items, e.g. bode 'message' : bodi 'body', where the disambiguation must be contextual. We will take the test of minimal pairs as valid with the proviso that the minimal pairs are selected entirely on the basis of surface segmental oppositions with no further morphological or etymological information involved.^ 4. 2. 3. Character of the phonemic opposition The examples listed in 4.2.2. suggest that the language was making use of a systematic minimal contrast between a non-high, non-front vowel spelled , and a high front (or high central) vowel spelled in absolutely final position. The graphemic-phonemic correspondences of the analyzed units can be represented in the following way:

Λ / \ 0

hi

I I /[i. i, 11/

The opposition between /a/ and any of the realizaizations of the spellings is bilateral - only two vowels can contrast in the particular environment, proportional - the features used to sustain the contrast appear elsewhere in the vocalic system /, /u/ in that function; alternating with 0. (2) Accusative Singular for all genders; as above; also alternating with 0. (3) Dative Singular for all genders; alternating with 0 . The alternation occurs with uninflected nouns originally belonging to the consonantal declensions. (4) Genitive Singular; mostly historically feminine nouns; alternating with 0. The alternation can occur with nouns of all genders originally belonging to the consonantal declensions.

126 Morphological aspects of schwa loss (5) Nominative Plural nouns of all genders, with the exception of Old English masculines, diachronically -a stems; alternating with 0. The alternation occurs in the Old English nouns with a long syllable stem, and also with most of the radical stems. (6) Accusative Plural for all genders, as above, also alternating with 0. (7) Genitive Plural - the only function in which [-e] does not alternate with 0? Before we proceed with the summary of the other functions of [-e] note that this morpheme can be the formal signal of nearly all substantival functions; the only function in which we do not expect to find this morpheme is the Dative Plural, and this distinction would be maintained only for a relatively early period in Middle English, i.e. up to about 1250 when the morpheme {-en}, the reduced form of the old [-um] still retained its consonantal closure. Another observation in connection with the inventory of case marking functions of the {-e} is that an alternation with 0 exists in all instances, with the sole exception of the Genitive Plural. This alternation is not an innovation in Middle English, it is a fact about the paradigmatic patterns of Old English to which no significance has been attached so far in the overall definition and ranking of the factors contributing to the loss of schwa in Middle English. The availability of a zero allomorph for six out of the seven grammatical functions of [-e] for the class of nouns only must, then, also be taken into consideration as a possible catalyst in the process of loss. If both zero and {-e} were at the disposal of the speakers for various items of the vocabulary, otherwise stored under the same class, it would be natural to assume that analogical forces must have been at work within the paradigm. These forces could render the selection of allomorphs more arbitrary; logically they could provide the favorable background against which the actual morphosyntactic loss of function was being effected. Thus we find analogy as the particular factor of language change which does not account for the creation of new forms but prepares the ground for and enhances the spread of already existing ones. A point which becomes apparent from the list of functions of [-e] above is the very high degree of homonymy/homophony of the grammatical markers of the noun in Middle English. It is well known that even in Old English the number of phonologically distinct inflexions had been greatly reduced as compared to previous stages of the language. This inflexional levelling is the natural consequence of the phonetic reduction and phonological neutralization of the

The morpho-syntactic functions of schwa 127 vowels in final syllables; the phonologically induced decay of the inflexional system is a process of long standing. Whereas phonetic reduction does not necessarily imply loss of the phoneme which has emerged as the product of neutralization, the loss of phonetic distinctions within the substantival inflexions is in a position to impair their proper utilization on a higher level. Isomorphism creates a situation where the morpheme becomes so "overworked" that it loses its ability to perform some or all of its original functions. Such arguments underlie the widely held opinion that it was the loss of the morphological relevance of the -e that brought about the ultimate loss of this unit in Late Middle English. This point will be addressed again after the survey of the remaining functions of {-e) in Middle English. 5.1.2

Adjectives

(1) Strong declension, Plural [-e] was preserved for the monosyllabic adjectives ending in a consonant - rarely alternating with 0 for adjectives of two or more syllables. (2) Weak declension, Singular {-e} was preserved for the monosyllabic adjectives ending in a consonant - regularly alternating with 0 for most other adjectives. I have not included a possible, but very early alternation between a residual feminine {-e} and 0 in the Singular of the strong declension, because, by common textbook consent, see for example Mossé (1952 [1968]: 64), for the majority of the Middle English corpus the strong forms of the singular adjective were uninflected. Given the relatively elaborate and non-overlapping inflexional system of the adjectives in Old English, it is easy to see that this word class underwent very early and very drastic inflectional reduction, resulting in a largely unified paradigm. Alternation with zero in one and the same function is much less frequent with this class than it is with the nouns, except for the singular of the weak declension. A paradigm-internal analogical levelling can only be assumed for the alternations in the plural of the strong adjectives; the direction of analogy there is towards generalization of the [-e] irrespective of the etymological type (Old English strong neuters with long syllable stems were uninflected). The situation with the weak declension is different. In spite of some instances of loss of -e in this group, it seems fairly certain that the [-e] of the weak adjectives cannot be subsumed under the blanket description of "functional insufficiency". The written evidence indicates very definitely that the weak

128 Morphological aspects of schwa loss pattern with {-e) survived well into the fourteenth century, a point addressed in detail in Samuels (1972). The tenacity of the morphological markedness of the weak adjectives in Middle English is a most intriguing issue, especially in view of the precariousness of schwa loss with adjectives as compared with other word classes. A highly differentiated paradigm is simplified very early for reasons such as phonetic reduction, which results in loss of gender and case agreement within the noun phrase. Number agreement for both the weak and the strong type survives and is generalized to {-e} for the adjectives - a parallel for which is provided by the way in which [-(e)s) is generalized as the plural inflexion for nouns. Within the weak declension, however, it is only a very specific syllabic configuration which continues to utilize the distinction between [-e] and 0 well into the fourteenth century. I believe that this phenomenon cannot be accounted for within a strictly morphological framework; an alternative account of the survival of these inflexions is proposed in Chapter 7. In view of the overall history of the adjectives in the Germanic languages there is one little peculiarity in the behavior of the weak adjectives in English. This distinction is characteristic of all modem Germanic languages, and English is the maverick among them for having shed it. The chronological "lateness" of the disappearance of the weak - strong distinction with adjectives might perhaps be seen in a wider typological perspective - other morphologically defined changes, such as loss of gender, case, verbal person, number, mood, are attested in other Germanic languages, but this is not true of the strong-weak adjectival patterns, see the table in Lass (1987: 318). How justified would be a speculation that there is something special about this distinction which survives elsewhere in Germanic, and is the last one expressed by {-e} to be abandoned in English? While this vaguely typological line of argument might appear a tempting possibility, it would be idle to suggest, and impossible to maintain, that there is a typologically-based preference in the language for pan-Germanic "correctness" of a specific morphological pattern. Language users cannot be credited with intuitions and sensibilities that go beyond their own time and language. Before I pass on to the verbal {-e} morphemes, a note on the behavior of some pronouns is due. Possessive pronouns (his/hise, her/here, ur/ure, her/here pi. etc.), as well as demonstrative pronouns (penipenne, pisi pise, per/pere etc.), appear with and without the final from a very early date. They will not be included as a separate group in the discussion of the morphological history of the {-e) for two reasons. On the one hand, these pronouns pattern with the adjectives following the strong declension. On the other hand, their syntactic position in the

The morpho-syntactic functions of schwa 129 sentence would not allow them to occupy a prominent position in the hierarchy of prosodie salience; these pronouns will be mere prosodie clitics when they appear within the noun phrase. Some discussion of these pronouns is included in Chapter six, within the framework of prosodically determined early schwa loss. Numerals behave generally like adjectives. The cardinals, normally following the strong declension, begin to appear with or without the final -e at a very early stage. Ordinal numbers follow the pattern of the weak adjectives and preserve the [-e] much longer. The loss of {-e} in adjectives, numerals, and nouns used attributively (see the genitive singular of nouns) must be distinguished from the loss of {-e} in nouns functioning as heads of noun phrases, and the loss of {-«} in verbs. The formal identification with a given class of words is a major factor determining the rate of disappearance of this morpheme, but their syntactic function, too should be taken into account 5.1.3.

Verbi4

(1) 1st Person Singular Present Indicative [-e] alternates with 0, the latter appearing with preterite-present verbs; post-1200 dialectal variation is also very frequent. (2) 3rd Person Singular Present Indicative, alternation of {-e} with 0 also occurs with preterite- present and irregular verbs. (3) Plural Present Indicative; the allomorphy in this function is considerable; {e], alternates with [-en] in the Midlands; 0 can appear throughout the country. 5 (4) The Subjunctive, Present, Past; earlier and more regularly in the Singular but also in the Plural [-e] had the allomorph 0. (5) The Imperative Singular; {-e) in this function is a subsidiary morphological signal replacing the traditional 0 , chiefly in the South, and therefore alternating with it there. (6) Preterite of strong verbs, 2nd Person Singular The [-e] in this function was abandoned in favour of the 0 very early. The alternation does not survive beyond 1200 in the North, but linger on in the South and Midlands until c. 1400.

130 Morphological aspects of schwa loss In addition to the functions in which the morpheme { - « } , phonologically /a/ is the entire inflexion, we find final also in morphemes containing other phonological material, where the alternation with 0 is also possible: (1) Preterite Singular of weak verbs. Alternation between forms ending in and is frequent from a very early date.^ The apocope of the final -e in this group is more marked with verbs with a long root syllable which would suggest interference of prosodie nature. (2) Non-finite forms, the present participles, which show alternation between two forms of the participial morpheme: and , as well as between the and . Due to the phonetic composition of the formative elements in this group these items were polysyllabic by definition; loss of final -e in them starts in Late Old English. In (1) and (2) above the final -e is bound with the preceding phonetic material into a single inflexion, and the alternation between allomorphs with and without -e does not affect the salience of the morphological marker in the same way in which the disappearance of just the [-e] would. Properly speaking, (1) and (2) above are instantiations of phonological loss, and they are included in this chapter only because they can be seen as an additional factor undermining the morphemic functionality of final -e with verbs. Apart from participating in the functions and alternations listed above, can appear as the reduced form of inflexions for which the Old English paradigm had more than a simple final unstressed vowel. Thus the Old English marker of the Infinitive is eventually weakened to as well, passing through the stage. This , on its part, had begun to alternate with 0 already before the thirteenth century. The development is more typically Northern; some analogical influence from the forms of the 1st Person Singular Present Indicative can probably be assumed. The same process affects the preterite plural -> -> - > 0 . These changes, too, contribute to the overloading of {-e) as a morphological entity. The survey of the morphological functions performed by -e in the paradigm of the verb shows that the situation, though not dissimilar, is not an absolute replica of that obtaining with the nouns. Once again the neutralization of the inflexional vowel has led to the emergence of a large number of homonymous markers. Analogical levelling within the paradigm is widely attested. In addition to these shared factors, the morphological significance of the in the verbal paradigm

The morpho-syntactic functions of schwa 131 was jeopardized due to the parallel existence of {-e}/0 allomorphy crossdialectally. In summary, the loss of final -e in the verbal paradigm has the following characteristics: -The loss of the with weak past tense forms and participles starts as a phonological change and produces allomorphy which in its own right can increase the chances of the already existing {-e}/£> allomorphy elsewhere in the verbal paradigm through analogy. -The elimination of distinctions between the indicative and the subjunctive is accompanied by the development of analytical forms for the subjunctive. -The gradual elimination of the inflexion for person (complete in Old English for the plural) reinforces the obligatoriness of the the subject as a surface syntactic constituent. This process can be related to the use of the introductory (h)it up to the thirteenth century, and the appearance of the existential there in subject position.? Historically, then, Middle English emerges as the period when the extensive polysemy of the {-e} creates an abnormal situation; it can no longer signal unaided all the grammatical distinctions within the paradigm of the noun, the adjective, the verb. Various other means of expressing these relations evolve, increased use of prepositions and fixed word order being the most frequently quoted innovations in this connection. Analytical forms develop to fill the subjunctive function of the verbal [-e]. The marking of the category of person extends from the morphology of the verb itself to the subject - verb complex unit, which would imply person marking overarching the entire clause. The order of syntactic constituents becomes less flexible in comparison to earlier periods, so that object pronouns begin to behave like noun objects and no longer appear before the finite verb. 5.1.4. Schwa as an adverbial suffix A survey of the morphological functions of {-e} should also refer to its ability to participate independently in the formation of adverbs. In Old English [-e] was a separate derivational morpheme in deadjectival adverbs. The practice continued in Middle English with adverbs of the type deepe 'deeply', loude 'loudly'. A final e may be added optionally to any other type of adverb: her(e) 'here', OE her, wher(e) 'where', OE hwar, ek(e) 'also' OE eac, etc., cf. Minkoff (1967: §75.1).

132 Morphological aspects of schwa loss Adverbs derived with the help of {-e} are treated in the same way as the other parts of speech with respect to phonological changes: the {-e} in them is also subject to deletion in hiatus. It shares its derivational powers with the quite distinctive and productive suffix {-lik(e)}. Since there is no zero derivation within the class of adverbs we must exclude the possibility of analogical influences being operative here. The demise of the -e as a derivational morpheme must be attributed initially to phonological loss resulting in decrease in the productivity of this suffix. The relatively free position of the adverb would also increase the likelihood of preservation of a distinct morphological shape for it. An adverb derived with the help of the [-e] suffix was no longer the distinctive structure, the salent morphological constituent, required to signal this word class; its allomorph {-/>} takes over, but not before some formal overlap between adverbs and adjectives. This overlap is discussed in detail in Burnley 1982, compare also the familiar situation in Modern English with morphologically non-distinctive adverbs such as hard, quick, fast, etc. Another link between schwa loss and word formation is exemplified by the history of the words whilom, buxom, seldom. Whereas the (-um) of the Dative generally undergoes reduction and subsequently loss in Middle English, when it is a specificallt adverbial suffix (which has its origin in the Dative as well) {-urn} has survived to this day, and seldom is in fact an analogical formation on the basis of the Old English form seldan. This is hardly surprising - phonologically identical inflexional and derivational morphemes can interact differently with phonological changes, a situation familiar in English from the operation of Middle English Open Syllable Lengthening, a change sensitive to inflexional final -e's, but indifferent to derivational morphology. The complex systemic instantiations of final -e in various grammatical classes show that there is no easy answer to the problem of the leading factors in the process of schwa loss. For some word classes, e.g. the adjectives, the loss appears to be both triggered and constrained by phonological factors. With the nouns, on the other hand, phonological loss is inextricably intertwined with paradigmatic levelling. An account of the entire process requires a more detailed discussion of the conditioning for each word class.

The morphologization of schwa loss 133 5.2. The morphologization of schwa loss

Early deletion with clear prosodie and phonological motivation - in weakly stressed words, in polysyllables, in hiatus - produced morphological loss in items in which /a/ coincided with [-e] in one of its functions. The number of potential instances of such complete overlap is considerable, as the evidence cited in Chapter Three indicates. In accounting for the loss in such cases we assume that there has been a process of morphologization of the loss. In the use of this term I follow the definition of (Wurzel 1980: 444): "... morphologizing ... holds whenever a rule, which so far has held for an operation of permutation, insertion or deletion in a phonological context P, changes in a way that it holds for the same operation (not necessarily only this one) or its inversion in a context of grammatical categories C". Phonological change interferes with the salience of the paradigms twice: first in the form of reduction and neutralization, setting the stage for paradigm uniformity, and then, once the paradigms have been levelled analogically, in the form of deletion. This latter phonological assault on the paradigms is in fact less damaging than the term deletion would imply - the major trend towards uniformity is set in motion in pre-deletion times; deletion is only one link in a chain of events which are mutually reinforcing. Deletion enhances the process of morphologization of schwa loss. "The introduction of grammatical categorial features into the context of a phonological rule as well as the introduction of other non-phonetic characteristics . . . implies a restriction of the phonetic motivation of the rule, a reduction of its phonological naturalness" (Wurzel 1980: 444-445). This suggests an intermediate, morphophonological, status of the change. Similar arguments in favour of the phonological starting point in the interpretation of morphonological processes were developed explicitly in Makaev and Kubryakova (1977). A basic characteristic of a morphonological process is that the morphological relevance of the phonological environment covers only a given class of morphemes (Makaev and Kubryakova 1977: 20-21). The chief function which characterizes a unit morphonologically is "the function of grammatical differentiation of classes or of series/sets of forms" (1977: 24). The definition may suggest a possibility to treat borderline cases, the cases in which an environmentally conditioned schwa loss is also morphologically

134 Morphological aspects of schwa loss relevant (e.g. pronouns, dative markers in hiatus, etc.), as instances exemplifying a morphonological process. This kind of analysis is problematic. First, adopting a morphonological interpretation and postulating an intermediate level of functioning of the -e in Middle English produces a peculiar type of phonological opposition, which is not the opposition between two phonological units with surface material realizations; an analysis involving an opposition between /s/ and J0 on the phonological level is questionable, and without a phonological set of alternating phonemes required for the characterization of the phenomenon there is no way of making the "morphophoneme" notion a viable analytical tool in the context of our data. Another difficulty arises from the theoretical expectation that a morphonological alternation should involve morpheme-internal variation; this requirement, too, is violated in this case.8 Morphonological alternations cannot be explained "exclusively on account of the properties of the respective phonemes and their combinations" (Makaev and Kubryakova, 1977: 16). In Middle English the loss of the phoneme /s/ is susceptible to factors of both morpho-syntactic nature, and factors which can be defined in phonological terms. Ultimately, the direction of the change towards elimination of existing signals renders this type of analysis inapplicable to the data, in spite of the potential theoretical appeal of tracing phonological changes to their morphologization through a morphophonemic stage. It believe that it is preferable to analyze -e only as a clearly defined unit on the two levels; its loss, too, involves processes on two separate levels. These processes are related, but there is no morphophonemic -e facilitating the transition from one type of function to another.

5.3. Classification and ranking of factors for schwa loss

The additional observations concerning the morphological nature of -e in Middle English enable us to address the problem of the factors involved in the process of its loss. I start by classifying the factors according to the way they affect the individual levels:

Classification and ranking offactors for schwa loss 135 5.3. 1. Phonological factors. Stress In diachronic studies of Germanic and English the hypothesis of the progressive concentration of stress on the root syllable as an initiating factor and a prerequisite for phonetic reduction and morphological levelling and loss in final unstressed syllables is axiomatic. More specifically, loss of stress and vowel shortening, in either oreder, affect the overall foot structure of the word: the process can be seen as progressive loss of the independent prosodie status of nonroot morphemes, where first inflexional, and then derivational morphemes cease to represent separate feet and are instead attached prosodically to the root, thus giving more structure and weight to the remaining foot in a word. This is a reasonable phonetic scenario, and therefore the assumptions about the far reaching effects of strong root stress have long been a staple in describing the history of English words. Concentration of stress is the factor which initially triggers neutralization in final unstressed syllables and perhaps impairs the clear-cut, oneto-one sound-meaning correspondence in that position. It is the only factor operating across the board and affecting all items of the vocabulary irrespective of their morphemic composition or syntactic position. The great significance of this factor is universally acknowledged, yet it is far from providing a rule of thumb valid for all vowel changes in final position. It has been argued that one of the most important consequences of the described concentration of stress is the reinforcement of the status of the root syllable as the semantic center of the word. This in itself paves the way for the emergence of two new models of word formation in English - conversion and clipping. The latter is due both to the fact that the stressed syllable of the root ranks highest in a hierarchy of "meaningfulness", and also to the productivity/pressure of the monosyllabic pattern in the language, thus Mod. E. doc, chap, van for 'doctor', 'chapman' (OE ceapmon), 'caravan', see Arakin (1976: 161). It must be underlined once again, however, that acceptance of this factor as the basic trigger does not provide an answer to the question why deletion should have occurred so massively in English, whereas other Germanic languages, in which the prosodie input and conditions must have been similar, preserved their inflexional system. To get closer to an answer we need to look for further clues which would be specific to English.

136 Morphological aspects of schwa loss 5. 3.2. Phonological factors. Environmental conditioning This loose heading will include three major types of environment-sensitive phonological changes, which are more specifically English, which does not mean that some of them are not attested outside English, and, indeed, outside Germanic. The three types of deletion induced by specifiable phonological environments are: - Segmental environment - elision in hiatus. - Syllabic structure - loss in trisyllabic words. - Syntactic patterning - loss in unstressed position in the clause - phonetic cliticization. The relevance and the results produced by these three groups of environments can differ. Environmentally induced changes apply selectively depending on the morphological and syntactic properties of the items. In contrast to stress concentration on the root syllable which is is an over-arching condition for all other changes but does not produce actual loss, environmental loss is related to specific sets within specific domains. The properties of these domains will be discussed in Chapters Six and Seven. 5. 3. 2. Morphological factors One of the important characteristics of schwa loss is that it has independent consequences for the morphology of the language. By destroying paradigmatic distinctions, phonologically induced schwa loss sets the stage for analogical spread of the change. Analogy is a morphological factor of language change - it touches only that subset of lexical items in which the final schwa is a morpheme, a fully fledged linguistic sign, not just an element building one. The {-e}/0 alternations in Middle English result in loss or morphemic identity. Morphemic identity determines the subsequent course of development of each morpheme.^ Ohlander (1976: 154ff.) outlines some principles of morphemic identification , according to which the following factors characterize the status of a given morpheme: (1) Formal distinctiveness. (2) Functional distinctiveness. (3) Relevance of quantitative considerations.

Classification and ranking of factors for schwa loss 137 (4) Productivity. The classification presented here does not repeat Ohlander's in full. He groups (1) and (2) together and defines (4) as the relationship between productivity, distinctiveness and morphemic status. The reasons for regrouping the criteria will become clear in the course of the discussion. 5. 3. 2.1. Formal distinctiveness The formal distinctiveness of a given morpheme must be defined in relation to the other morphemes of the language; also, formal distinctiveness is a languagespecific notion. It is the direct consequence of the perceptual salience of the phonological material which goes into the building of a morpheme.10 Within the paradigmatic patterns of Middle English the morpheme {-«} is frequently found in functions in which it has to compete with an allomorph of much greater formal distinctiveness. An empirical basis for the assessment of formal distinctiveness is provided by the actual number and type of phonemes making up the morpheme. Thus the {-e} of the nominative plural of feminine nouns (the same allomorph will appear later also with nouns of all genders belonging to the -an stems in Old English) is less formally distinctive than the {es} in the same function. This will also hold true of the {-e)l{-es) allomorphy in the genitive singular of nouns. The importance of this factor for the overall distinctiveness of a particular morpheme is not absolute. The Present Plural Indicative of the verb in Middle English exhibits the formally distinct allomorphs {-es/is} in the North and {-en} in the Midlands. Despite their formal distinctiveness the alternation with zero begins to occur at an early date, induced by syntactic, possibly also extralinguistic factors which override the operation of the factor formal distinctiveness. 5. 3. 2. 2. Functional distinctiveness Insofar as it is a natural tendency for every linguistic system to strive after a oneto-one correspondence between form and function, the notion of functional distinctiveness is a corollary of formal distinctiveness. But while formal distinctiveness refers strictly to the phonological material of a given morpheme, its functional distinctiveness is determined also by semantic and syntactic factors. In other words, loss of formal distinctiveness entails loss of functional

138 Morphological aspects of schwa loss distinctiveness, but functional non-distinctiveness can be the result of the operation of other factors, unrelated to phonological structure. The introduction of this "functional" parameter in describing the loss of -e raises the interesting question of the relation between the familiar linguistic principles of economy and redundancy. Both principles are related to the communicative function of language in the sense that "economy" would be unthinkable if it threatens to damage severely the communicative function, and the balance between "economy" and the communicative needs is presumably restored or maintained through redundancy. If phonological factors alone determined the change of -e to zero, this could be described as "economy", both in phonological and morphological terms. The necessary equilibrium in this case is licensed by changes in a different part of the language system, in syntax, and it would be difficult to say whether the change is "economical" or not. Perhaps one could speak of economy which is paradigmatic, balanced off by syntagmatic innovations. In Middle English the formal levelling of inflexions led to the development of largely homonymous paradigmatic patterns. This was the case with all three word classes discussed in the previous section. Within the paradigm of the noun, however, the levelling of inflexions and the loss of {-e} in some functions was well under way at a time (c. 1100 and after, see Dahl (1936)) when most verbal morphemes and the markers of the weak adjectives were still preserved, unless subjected to environmental phonological deletion. This chronological situation suggests that for the class of nouns it was both the formal homophony and the functional insufficiency which conspired to produce early loss of the morpheme M. From a diachronic point of view the state of syncretism (defined as neutralization of the formal distinctions within the paradigm or parts of it) between the forms of the Nominative and the Accusative in Old English is a matter of elimination of formal distinctiveness only. The functional distinctiveness of the two cases is coded into the syntactic rules for ordering the subject and the object constituents in the clause. The reason for the formal collapse of the Accusative and the Dative is different; "it is not due to phonological developments, but follows as a result of the decreased understanding/realization of the difference in the use of the two cases" (Brunner 1962, Vol. 2: 43). The same interpretation of the neutralization between the Dative and the Accusative is given in Moskal'skaya (1977). Her account addresses more specifically the way in which the difference between the two cases was

Classification and ranking of factors for schwa loss 139 eliminated. In the non- prepositional use of the Dative and the Accusative "the initial driving force of the neutralization is . . . not the loss of inflexions (which can only be a catalyst in this process and serve as its limit), but the progressive grammaticization of the Dative case, its transition into a syntactic objective case" (1977: 200). The neutralization affects also the prepositional use of these cases, this neutralization is related to the process of redistribution of functions between cases and prepositions. As mentioned earlier, the evidence for this type of change at a very early date is very strong. Blakeley (1947/8) found numerous zero Dative forms with nouns of the old -o declension in Late Northumbrian. A very similar observation was made by Brunner: "Dative and Accusative forms are mixed up in the continuation of the Old English Chronicle of the 12th c." (Brunner 1962, Vol. 2: 43). Lack of functional distinctiveness in its turn produces the necessary perceptual conditions for the elimination of formal distinctiveness through analogical spread. So in discussing the history of schwa loss with regard to the nouns we must say that they represent lexical items for which one of the leading factors for the change must be sought for in the lack of functional distinctiveness between the dative and the accusative accompanied by the lack of formal distinctiveness which applies to all cases. 5. 3. 2. 3. Relevance of quantitative considerations. Analogy Describing the functions of the morpheme {-e) in the previous section we noted the extremely frequent occurrence of this morpheme in the paradigms of the various grammatical classes. In addition to the sheer frequency of the {-e}, its salience seems to suffer from the fact that out of the fifteen different functions which {-e) is called upon to signal in Middle English, thirteen can also remain unmarked, or have a zero marker. This alternation appears either within the confines of one and the same lexical item, one and the same word class, or crossdialectally. In purely quantitative terms then, the situation in Middle English will favour the operation of analogy within the paradigm. Analogy will be a factor working in tandem with, and enhancing, the lack of formal and functional distinctiveness but not initiating change in its own right. Typologically analogy, though quite powerful in paradigm levelling processes, cannot account for the blotting out of differences between linguistic units which have the full status of linguistic signs. It should be added here that the laws of analogy as defined by Kuryiowicz (1947) and Manczak (1980) are only indicative of the most frequently observed

140 Morphological aspects of schwa loss tendencies in a number of languages and would not be applicable with any consistency to the schwa data. 11 5. 3. 2. 4. Productivity This factor characterizing the status of a given morpheme will refer strictly to the viability of this morpheme as a derivational suffix. Final schwa in Middle English is a peripheral unit in the inventory of derivational affixes in the language. The one instance which requires comment is the adverbial {-e}. In most cases the adverbial derivational -e is replaced in Middle English by {-(y), and this change can indeed be regarded as a diachronic consequence of the lack of formal distinctiveness of the -e. This aspect of the history of the derivational -e is parallelled by the loss of adverbial {-e} side by side with the survival, and even spread of {-um}. The loss of -e as a derivational suffix has resulted in some instances in the emergence of homonymous forms for the adjective and the adverb of the deep, loud, quick, hard type, with or without additional semantic differentiation and secondary adverbial formation. From the point of view of productivity, then, the derivational role of the suffix -e has had no significant effect on the implementation of schwa loss. Its low formal distinctiveness did not allow it to arrest or reverse the course of the change; this contributes further to the overall weakness of the -e on both the phonological and the morphological level.

5.4. Syntactic correlates^

A classification of the system-internal factors for schwa loss in Middle English would be incomplete without a consideration of the simultaneous developments in the sphere of syntax. Syntactic changes would normally be regarded as coocurring with, or resulting from, rather than causing, schwa deletion. The chronological parallelism between schwa loss and some syntactic changes suggests a counterfeeding relationship; this section provides a brief discussion of the plausibility of considering individual syntactic factors and developments as instrumental in phonological and morphological loss. By virtue of the Chronological simultaneity, as well as traditional functionalist notions, have

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created a scholarly tradition in which schwa loss is associated with the description of the following syntactic parameters in the history of English: 5.4.1. Word order The development of a fixed word order in Middle English is a strong candidate for a syntactically defined factor for schwa loss. It is traditional that histories of the language approach the development of subject-verb-object (SVO) word order in English from the assumption that there exists an interdependence between the loss of formal case markers for the noun phrase, and the rigidification of word order. Even if this position is not central in studies of the syntactic evolution of English, it is invariably addressed in some f o r m . The position adopted here is that the "compensatory" character of schwa loss in relation to the emergence of new word order patterns in Middle English is not axiomatic in spite of its functionalist appeal. Some questions and arguments which should be anticipated and addressed in this context are listed below: (1) In Old English full noun phrases and pronouns behaved differently with respect to word order: object pronouns regularly preceded the verb, while noun objects are normally placed after the verb, thus: Isaac p>a ascode Abraham hisfader...

(7)

'Isaac then asked Abraham his father... ' but: Se engel him cwaeS to... 'The angel said to him'

(11) Genesis 22: 7-11.

The repositioning of the personal pronouns, their decliticization in terms of Kemenade (1987), is a major component in the establishment of SVO word order in the history of English. Formally, however, these pronouns have undergone remarkably little change, preserving the distinction between subject and object forms. Speculations about the causal link between the availability of formal inflexional distinctiveness and a particular word order (non-SVO) become therefore more difficult to defend in that light: why did pronouns, which did not lose morphological salience, also participate in the word order change? In other words, one crucial change, pronominal decliticization, can only be related to the

142 Morphological aspects of schwa loss morphological status and attrition of schwa in a very indirect manner, through analogy on the full noun phrases. (2) The very uneven rate of establishment of a modern word order in main versus subordinate clauses would also pose a problem for the unconditional acceptance of the dependence between schwa loss and the rigidification of word o r d e r . There is no evidence that schwa loss proceeded at different rates in main and subordinate clauses, whereas it appears that subordinate clauses reached their present-day word order earlier than main clauses. (3) Widespread phonologically conditioned schwa loss in Early Middle English does not have to, and indeed, did not, correlate with fixed word order - a famous case in point is the Peterborough Chronicled (4) Loss of case distinctions occurs in 7 languages in the Germanic group: English, Dutch, Afrikaans, Yiddish, Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish.^ The loss of the verb-second rule, which constitues one of most dramatic syntactic differences between Modern English and the other Germanic languages is not attested anywhere outside English. Any theory which assumes a causal relation between these two phenomena should explain also the absence of such correlation in 6 out of the 7 languages mentioned above. Unlike nominative - accusative - dative case syncretism with the nouns which is manifested as loss of schwa, loss of verbal {-e} should be separated from the general loss of person and number marking on the verb, which belongs to a later period. The distinction is still functional in Standard Modern English, marginally (and redundantly), with the 3rd person singular present tense {-s}. At the end of the fourteenth century, cross-dialectally, the present indicative paradigm of the verb preserved four distinct inflexions: {-e/0} - 1st person singular, {-(e)s(t)} 2nd person singular, {eslep } - 3rd person singular, [-es/en/ep } - for the plural. Schwa loss, though it will produce paradigm uniformity, more so in the past tense forms than in the present, does not cause the sweeping convergence of forms attested with the nominal cases. So whatever syntactic correlates are postulated for the loss of verbal marking, they belong more properly to a post-schwa loss stage in the language, the fifteenth and the sixteenth c e n t u r y . From a morphologically marked grammatical category of the verb in Old English, the category of person develops in Middle and Early Modern English into a lexico-syntactic category inseparably linked to the subject. The subjectverb contact becomes much more important and "intense" so that the complete predication in a sentence is no longer expressed by the verbal form alone, but by

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the subject - verb unit as a whole. Thus in Modern English "one can speak of the participation of the subject in the expression of the predication" (Ivanova, Burlakova, Poceptsov (1981: 191).^ This is related both to the changes in the structural position and the overall semantic content of the syntactic category of the subject in the history of English. The same arguments would be applicable to the changes of the number marking of the verb - from a jointly marked category in Old- and most of Middle English, it is now overtly marked only on the subject (save for the {-s}) which makes inflexion not a local property of the verb phrase, but a property referring to the whole sentence. Another traditional argument for relating schwa loss and word order comes from the history of dative constructions of the pam cynge licode X 'the king liked X' type. A discussion of this syntactic change would be in place only if one approached the issue from the premise that schwa loss and word order change in English are causally linked. I have tried to show that this is not an assumption which can be applied automatically to all instances involving loss of case markers. 5. 4. 2. The use of prepositions Use of prepositions was a widely used means of expressing grammatical relations, already in Old English. The desemantization of case markers in prepositional phrases developed relatively early; in Old English it was particularly advanced in such adverbial functions as the instrumental, the locative, etc. There is evidence that periphrastic prepositional constructions for the dative, for example, go as far back as the first substantial written records of Old E n g l i s h . i n terms of Ohlander's morphological critera it would be natural to expect that "there exists a connection between the occurrence of prepositionless instances and the formal distinctiveness of the respective patterns" (Danchev 1969: 77), and indeed this is exactly what the textual evidence s h o w s . I n line with the comments on the importance of morphemic formal distinctiveness earlier in this chapter, the inflexional marker is seen also as functionally redundant. This is a good case of possible mutual reinforcement between the increased use of prepositions and the loss of -e. It has been suggested that in Old English the choice between a prepositional and a prepositionless construction (for the dative instrumental in particular) could be governed by stylistic considerations (Danchev 1969: 93). Such stylistically determined variation would be predictable in linguistic situations in which grammatically equivalent structures coexist. It would also be expected that the innovative construction will appear and spread first in the spoken

144 Morphological aspects of schwa loss register. If the more extensive use of prepositions correlates with a register representing a more colloquial style, this fact relates in an interesting way to the comments by Poussa (1982: 73ff.) on the Danish - English contact situation in Late Old English. Assuming that a kind of East Midland creole was established in the ninth century, whose status was later raised to a "supra-regional spoken koiné", one would imagine that this koiné would be characterized by precisely those stylistic features which select an innovative over a more traditional form. This links the stylistic markedness of prepositional constructions to the language contact situation; hence, indirectly, we are connecting once again the phenomenon of schwa loss and the extralinguistic history, where increased use of prepositions serves as a mediating syntactic factor. Throwing the net of "language contact" over each and every instance of variation and diachionic change may be an appealing and satisfactory idea in some cases, but it is also too general to be accepted without caution. Görlach (1986) offers an extensive discussion of some serious problems with the creolization hypothesis for Middle English. We return to this issue in section 5.5. In terms of style, too, the relation is not automatic. In his interesting study of syntax and style in Old English Yerkes (1982) compares two versions of Waerferth's translation of Gregory's dialogue, the original translation dated between the early 870s and 890s, and the revision - roughly between 950 and 1050 (1982: 9). His findings indicate that that the second revised version is stylistically much more formal; it shows "more control. . . greater clarity, and tighter composition" (1982: 11), and yet prepositions in that version have replaced cases (1982: 27, Table), also (1982: 83). 5. 4. 3. The development of modal auxiliaries This important aspect of the syntactic history of English could also be associated with the loss of schwa, and more specifically with the loss of inflexional distinctions for most forms of the indicative and the subjunctive. A recent example of an assumed link between the two processes is provided by Millward (1989: 160): "In line with the generally analytic trend of the language, Middle English began increasingly to use modal auxiliaries like may and might and quasimodals like be going to and be about to in place of the inflected subjunctive." The statement is of course quire general and is cited here as a token of the way in which the uncontroversial "analytic trend", and therefore schwa loss, argumentation could be logically extended to major syntactic changes in the history of English. The semantic and syntactic changes which auxiliaries undergo from Old to Middle

Syntactic correlates

145

and Modern English undoubtedly overlap chronologically, at least partially, with the neutralization and attrition of final unstressed vowels. This chronological parallel is not a sufficient justification for assuming a significant interrelation for two reasons. First, modal paraphrases with the verbs sculan, willan, magan were quite frequent in Old English. Second, even at the peak of its use, the subjunctive {-e} could not have been an indispensable signal of modality, since [-e] appears in specific syntactic contexts and is therefore predictable, being supported by alternative overt syntactic means: conjunctions, as in clauses of time, after œr, hwonne, in clauses of purpose and result, or by word order (clauseinitial position), as in conditional and concession clauses. So looking for a compensatory link between schwa loss and the development of modal auxiliaries is not promising; whatever link exists between the two changes should be seen as either accidental, or limited to the temporal parallelism. In view of the "analytical trend" referred to above, such connection(s) must be defined negatively, i.e.: the development of modal auxiliaries would remove a functional obstacle, or facilitate schwa loss, but not vice versa. Another syntactic change which may be mentioned in the context of loss of schwa is the shift in the nature of verbal complementation from Old to Middle English. It is a familiar fact that a number of Old English verbs required an object noun phrase in the Dative or the Genitive case. Thus, with verbs of the type derian 'to harm', or helpan 'to help', we find: On worulde monnum ne deriap mane a pas 'wicked oaths inflict no injury on men in the world' and: We on disum life magon helpan Sam for piare num... 'we in this life may help the departed...' (Bosworth and Toller 1983: 203, 527). The so called "causative objects" take the Genitive as m : he earnode eces lifes 'he had great merit with respect to eternal life', and in hiforgiton ealra goddœada 'they were forgetful concerning all those good deeds' (Visser, 1970, 1: 355). According to Visser such verbs were "intransitive" in Old English, and they subsequently underwent a process of "transitivization on a large scale". Neutralization of inflexional distinctions is cited as one of the main causes for this development: "When - owing to the inflexional syncretism which set in in Late Old English and became general in Middle English - the dative had lost its discriminative form ... the function of this complement in the sentence, i.e. its syntactical relation to the verb, was no longer signally expressed. It is a fair assumption that in the long run speakers and hearers, ceasing to realize it as denoting a kind of recipient (indirect object), came to identify its function with that of the direct object of a transitive verb" (Visser 1970,1: 128). Mitchell (1985, 1: 232-234) objects to the use of the term "transitive" in this context, but also invokes case syncretism to explain the loss

146 Morphological aspects of schwa loss of formal variation after verbs which originally selected objects in cases other than the Accusative. So, even if we do not describe the change of verbal properties in terms of a switch from intransitive to transitive, we still have a case of direct link between schwa loss and a surface syntactic change in English, where direct objects and prepositional phrases, the latter sometimes eligible for passivisation, have replaced the earlier case marked forms. The reference to some syntactic changes indirectly associated with the loss of e in Middle English through loss of inflexions is obviously not meant to provide an exhaustive account of all possible syntactic implications of schwa loss. Such a survey would belong in a study of the consequences of case syncretism on the syntactic structure of the language. Singling out the neutralization and loss of schwa as a primary factor in this context would entail approaching English historical syntax from a rather idiosyncratic angle. This angle exists, however, and should be incorporated into any comprehensive account of inter-level triggers and effects.

5.5. Extralinguistic factors

Schwa loss proceeded slowly against the background of several centuries of periodic foreign invasions, settlements, all levels of contact, including intermarriage, between Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians, and Normans. A realistic description of the change requires that the extralinguistic situation should also be taken account of. Fisiak (1977: 247) points out in connection with Middle English that "the formal and social factors are closely intertwined and therefore neither of them can be ignored, but under certain circumstances one of the two may become dominant". The introductory review of the possible explanations of language change in Chapter One included some comments on the more recent theories in the literature concerning the role of extralinguistic factors in historical linguistics. It was noted that such factors have always been considered important in shaping the morphological system of English. The short passage cited below provides a classic example of the way in which historians of English have linked history and language change:

Extralinguistic factors 147 As the Scandinavians and the English could understand one another without much difficulty it was natural that many niceties of grammar should be sacrificed, the intelligibility of either tongue coming to depend mainly on its mere vocabulary. So when we find that the wearing away and levelling of grammatical forms in the regions in which the Danes chiefly settled was a couple of centuries in advance of the same process in the more southern parts of the country, the conclusion does not seem unwarrantable that this acceleration of the tempo of linguistic simplification is due to the settlers, who did not care to learn English correctly in every minute particular and who certainly needed no such accuracy in order to make themselves understood (Jespersen 1938 [1962]: §79). Poussa (1982) developed an explicit and detailed proposal for regarding Middle English as the product of a creolization process. She constructed her argument around a set of grammatical properties which would support a hypothesis of a major "crossing of strains" during the Late Old English and the Middle English periods, a kind of hybridization which could result in the creation of a new system, a Middle English (East Midland) creole. The chronological sequences involved in the change are summarized in her table reproduced on p. 9 of this study. This section looks again at some of her arguments. 5.5.1. Creolization arguments and counterarguments One central argument used to substantiate Poussa's 1982 hypothesis rests on the overall dialectal distribution of schwa loss in Middle English. The logic of this point eseentially repeats Jespersen's familiar observation concerning the "linguistic simplification" in the North and the Midlands in Middle English; "simplification" in the "interlanguage" paradigm is taken as central to, and symptomatic of "pidginization - creolization processes which take place in the spoken form when two languages hybridize to form a creole as a result of direct contact between two speech communities" (Poussa 1982: 70). In morphological terms this translates as loss of grammatical gender and general disintegration of the inflexional system; these two changes are recognizably much more advanced in the areas of the North and the Midlands than in the more conservative South. (1100-1400). The question remains, however, to what extent this parallelism is related to causation. Despite Poussa's coherently presented argument, the use of

148 Morphological aspects of schwa loss the term "creole" and the creolization hypothesis for Middle English has elicited skeptical response for the following reasons: (1) The definition of what constitutes a creole is confusingly flexible in the "interlanguage" literature. Görlach (1986: 332-333) lists four distinct and incompatible uses of the terms "creole/creoloid". (2) Even if we accept the validity of inflexional simplification and loss (a feature loosely shared by all definitions of the term "creole") as a criterion for "creolness", Middle English cannot be described as a language in which all creolization features are prominent, i.e. it lacks some important inflexional deficiencies supposedly characteristic of creóles. " . . . Middle English did not lose, as would be expected in a "proper" creole, gender and case in pronouns, number in nouns, personal endings and tense markers in verbs; it retained the passive and did not replace tense by aspect" (Görlach 1986: 341). In continuation of Görlach's list we can raise wo additional objections, one concrete, and the other one more a matter of discomfort with the heuristic procedure: (3) Some adjectival inflexions of Middle English, although they were most severely affected by the process of analogical levelling, survived well into the fourteenth century. The survival is not specific to a particular dialectal area. Even if the preservation of the weak - strong adjectival pattern has an independent explanation, there remains the singular plural inflexion which is fairly stable even after the beginning of the "English patriotic revival" which is taken as the endpoint of creolization. (4) Heavy reliance on the difference between written and spoken language underlies the hypothesis. The claim that the creole is the spoken form renders it untestable. While reference to the spoken form is a highly desirable component of any linguistic analysis, formulating a major historical hypothesis on the basis of nonexistent or marginal documentation compounds the problems mentioned above. Middle English may or may not be described as creole, given the latitude of the various definitions of this term. Yet awareness and reappraisal of Jespersen's observations cannot be a futile undertaking. The linguistic impact of the Scandinavian settlement must be taken into consideration in describing the history

Extralinguistic factors 149 of the English noun system. Scandinavian influence may provide a possible clue to the problem of the divergence of English (and Afrikaans) from the remaining Germanic languages, where, in spite of reduced stress, no comparable loss of gender has occurred. Also, renewed interest, as well as a detailed survey of the history of the early (ninth to tenth century) English - Danish contacts, such as Poussa's study offers, can be very useful in removing some possible chronological objections to the linguistic effect of Scandinavian on English.^ *

5.6. Hierarchy of factors within individual word classes

None of the factors for schwa loss discussed in this chapter were defined as inherently "stronger" or "weaker", yet they clearly affect the various word classes differently according to grammatical function, syntactic, and prosodie properties. The class-internal ordering of factors suggested below is only tentative; the hierarchy proposed is an attempt to arrange, summarize, and highlight factors which according to the survey in this study have had an important effect on the development of the respective word c l a s s i I.

NOUNS 1. Loss of formal morphological distinctiveness^ 2. Extralinguistic factors/Scandinavian influence 3. Loss of functional distinctiveness. 4. Increased use of prepositions 5. Syllabic structure (for compounds)

II.

VERBS 1. Loss of formal morphological distinctiveness 2. Syllabic structure (for past tense of weak verbs, participles) 3. Development of modal auxiliaries 4. Phonological cliticization (for auxiliaries)

III.

ADJECTIVES 1. Loss of formal morphological distinctiveness 2. Syllabic structure (for for polysyllabic adjectives)

IV.

ADVERBS 1. Loss of formal morphological distinctiveness

150 Morphological aspects of schwa loss 2. Loss of derivational productivity V.

PRONOUNS 1. Phonological cliticization 2. Loss of formal morphological distinctiveness

VI.

NON MAJOR CLASS WORDS 1. Phonological cliticization

Schwa loss in Middle English is firmly set within a phonological frame; the initial impulse for the change is phonological for all word classes (lack of stress), and it ultimately affects all vocabulary items. The end result justifies a characterization of schwa loss as a phonological change. Within this general phonological frame, the process is sensitive to other factors, morphological, syntactic, and prosodie, which affect the course of the change selectively with respect to the individual word classes. The most "precocious" group is that of the nouns - they seem to be most susceptible to Scandinavian influence, which in combination with the absence of formal distinctiveness and the availability of the prepositional phrase option produces analogical levelling. Phonology proper is of only secondary importance with them. With nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and partly pronouns, the loss of schwa results in loss of formal distinctiveness. At the other end of the scale, with non major class words, schwa loss can be attributed solely to the operation of phonological factors.

Notes

1. The logical differentiation between phonology - morphology - syntax, inherent in a language level approach, is indisputably a construct, and not a reflexion of the way people conceptualize language. Phonology and morphology are separated here prior to an attempt at integrating them and discussing the interplay of the two facets later in this study. "The analysis of linguistic behavior does not allow us to regard language as a hierarchically organized system, which only allows for a unidirectional transition from a lower level to a higher one; the use of language is possible only because frequently phonemic decisions are not taken on the basis of phonetic information, but as a result of the knowledge of the morphological structure of words, of the links within the syntactic phrase, and, finally, of the overall

Notes 151 meaning of the utterance" (Zinder and Bondarko 1980), see also Sommerstein (1977: 165) on the impossibility of distinguishing between phonological and syntactic information. 2. The point about the overloading of the morpheme containing only schwa in the inflexional system of Middle English is made frequently, see the reference to Horn and Lehnert (1954) in Chapter Two. A list similar to the one compiled here appears in Basil Cottle's The Triumph of English: 13501400, and again in Cottle (1985: 14). The aim of Cottle's lists is stylistic, geared to the student of literature. The organization of the data and the amount of detail presented here render the two accounts quite different and independently justifiable. 3. By "alternating with 0 " is meant the existence of nouns belonging to a different declensional type in Old English with a zero inflexional morpheme in a particular function. The very existence of a zero allomorph might indicate the possibility of its analogical extension in the respective function. The possibility of the [-e] disappearing under the influence of some prosodie factors is not taken into account here, since attention at this point is focused on the morphemic relations of -e within the inflexional paradigm of one and the same word class. Allomorphs of [-e] in the same function have not been mentioned; these are not of consequence at this point I rejected the analysis involving a zero participant in the phonological oppositions of which /a/ could be a member on the grounds that phonological oppositions involve only actual phonetic material whose presence is or is not semantically significant. My justification for employing the notion of "zero" on the morphological level is that a paradigmatic zero is grammatically significant. For a summary of the functional considerations in favour of setting up a zero representation of morphological categories see Kastovsky (1980: 215ff.) and the references there. 4. There is considerable dialectal variation in the verbal inflexions in Middle English. The list presented here is selective. The focus here is on the co-occurrence of [-e] and 0 in one and the same grammatical function. A geographically oriented picture will reveal that the dialects of the North and the Midlands arc more advanced with respect to paradigm levelling. The {-i} allomorph for verbs belonging to the second weak conjugation has been ignored as it eventually follows the changes affecting the [-e].

152 Morphological aspects of schwa loss 5. Especially characteristic of the order V - Subject Pronoun (binde we), see Minkoff (1967: 142,282), and also Fisiak (1968:94). 6. > stands for any form of the dental suffix marking the past tense of weak verbs. This type of alternation was mentioned in connection with the examples from The Peterborough Chronicle quoted in Chapter Three. 7. See Mossé (1952: 128). 8. Erdmann (1972) refers to schwa deletion in Middle English as having the effect of transfering morphological information from the final vowel onto the root. The same case could be made, historically, for the loss of the nominative/accusative marker after a heavy stem. This will not, however, eliminate the second difficulty in treating -e loss in morphonological terms. 9. This clearly functionalist statement is too sweeping to be acceptable as it stands. However, it is coherent and sensible in the narrow context of morphemic functions of {-e} in Middle English. 10. The situation with the Modern English formative suffixes is an excellent illustration of this point. According to Ohlander (1976: 177): "Only syllabic suffixes should be assigned primary morphemic status." He refers to Marchand (1969) according to whose statistics out of the eighty suffixes in Modem English only one, {-iA }, is non- syllabic. 11. Manczak's first law states that: "The number of morphemes having the same meaning more often diminishes than increases", which would be inapplicable to the [-e}/0 alternation in Middle English. His second law: "In the case of (a) shorter morphemes - longer morphemes, (b) shorter words - longer words, (c) words - word groups, the latter more often replace the former than vice versa" (1980: 284 ) may be seen as relevant in the isolated case of replacement of the adverbial formative [-e] by {-/y}. Manczak's laws are more specifically morpheme-oriented than Kuryfowicz's postulates of 1947. 12. The same set of factors were addressed in Minkova (1984b: 449). The arguments and conclusions presented below differ from my earlier treatment, which was based on acceptance of the classical textbook tradition. 13. The association word order changes with the loss of morphological markers is a powerful explanatory stratagem in syntactic studies. Even a nonphilological study of great linguistic sophistication, based on current syntactic theory, such as van Kemenade's 1987 book Syntactic case and morphological case in the history of English (Chapter 6) refers to "morphological reduction" as one of the causes of word order change. More and more questions have been raised recently concerning the "necessary"

Notes 153 relationship between the stabilization of SVO word order in English and the loss of case-marking, see for example Lass (1987: 336), who summarizes the problems with that relationship in the following way: "... such a scenario implies one of two (impossible) kinds of 'linguistic action': either (a) speakers actually found themselves confusing subjects and objects, and took steps to remedy the situation; or (b) they foresaw that they might do so, if things went on the way they were, so they took the requisite steps in advance". 14. For a coverage of the evidence and a proposed account of this discrepancy, see Stockwell & Minkova (1989) 15. "Contrary to the view that it was the previous existence of analytic machinery which brought about loss of inflexion, inflexional loss here seems to be more advanced than the procedures needed to replace it." And further "... the evidence suggests that loss of the Dative case, for instance, takes place rather in spite of a lack of substitute procedures than because its functions had already been usurped by them" Clark (1970: xxiv). 16. These properties of the languages in question are cited from the table (6.1) in Lass (1987: 318); which provides a summary of the innovative vs. conservative features of the modern Germanic languages. 17. Van Kemenade has suggested that "due to the loss of verbal morphology, subject pronouns cease to be interpreted as clitics, while retaining their positioning on the left of the finite verb in root clauses" (1987: 221). This argument may be hard to defend for the following reason: while there is no significant difference in the verbal morphology between the dialects of Wycliff and Chaucer, in Wycliff nominal subjects follow the patterns for pronouns (and lose verb-second), whereas in Chaucer pronominal subjects begin to behave like nominal subjects (preserving verb-second). This proposal provides for the desired outcome of syntactic "decliticization" of the pronouns, i.e. in both dialects nouns and pronouns behave identically, therefore decliticization must be accepted as the best account, yet it does not tell us how and why the loss of verbal morphology should be invoked as the basis for reanalysis in only one of the two dialects. 18. One would assume that in the terminology of GB grammar this might translate into: "English changed from a V-headed S with INFL in COMP to an INFL-headed S... " (van Kemenade 1987: 223). 19. For more discussion see Danchev (1969: 90)

154 Morphological aspects of schwa loss 20. "...the more clear-cut a given pattern, the higher the probability for the occurrence of prepositionless instances. Thus, only a very limited number of prepositionless instances occur with nouns containing various types of derivational suffixes; as regards inflexional suffixes, the plural suffix is in general more distinctive or conspicuous than the singular suffix (-e as compared to -um) and prepositionless instances prevail heavily in the plural, indeed" (Danchev 1969: 77). 21. A similar objection was raised by e.g. Ivanova and Cahoyan (1976: §100) who refer to Jespersen as the originator of the Scandinavian influence theory (without a bibliographical reference to any of his works). Their main argument is chronological; they believe that the "Scandinavian" factor on which Jespersen relied so heavily could not have determined the profound qualitative shift in the grammatical structure of the language because the roots of the change lie in Old English. 22. Two of the factors discussed earlier in the chapter are not included in the hierarchy: absence of stress on the final syllable, and schwa elision in hiatus they are present by default and equally valid for all word classes. 23. The entailments of loss of formal distinctiveness - loss of functional distinctiveness and the relevance of quantitative considerations, will be present in a different degree in each word class. Analogical spread of the most frequent forms is a corollary in all cases of loss of formal distinctiveness.

Chapter 6 Early schwa deletion as a prosodie phenomenon

6.1. Early schwa loss data

The prosodie nature of schwa loss has not attracted the variety of theoretical interpretations characteristic of descriptions of other central phonological changes in English. This chapter is an attempt to add a new dimension to the discussion of this issue by defining the conditions and consequences of early context-sensitive schwa loss. ^ The period between 1200 and 1400 is only the central phase of the process of schwa deletion, when it was spreading gradually across the vocabulary. The textual evidence for this "most active" stage of the change presents a very amorphous and inconsistent picture. Conservatism in spelling, flexible versification rules, and, in a number of cases, the dual character of schwa, a phoneme and a grammatical morpheme at the same time, render judgments about the presence or absence of schwa very difficult The data survey in the earlier chapters shows clearly, however, that schwa began to be omitted in certain environments long before 1200. Instances of this early change — Late Old English up to 1250 — are less numerous than later instances and fall into several clearly defined groups. Such data is easily identified and isolated, as was seen in Chapter 3. Now I want to focus on these fairly uncontroversial early cases of loss, thereby avoiding the overwhelming bulk and inconclusiveness of the later evidence. I shall try to interpret the early data in terms of a non-linear phonological framework, pointing out that the "precociousness" of the change in certain environments can be seen as realization of prosodically determined preferences in the spoken language. The earliest instances of schwa loss follow several familiar patterns:^ 6. 1. 1. Elision in hiatus Recall from the section on elision in hiatus in Chapter 3 that "There can be no doubt that weak vowels were often elided before another vowel [or h- DM] in ordinary OE speech" (Sweet 1922: §374). Luick, too, believed that after the tenth century elision became "more frequent and general as a consequence of the

156 Early schwa deletion as a prosodie phenomenon acceleration of the speech tempo: already before Orm's time each post- tonic -e disappears before a following vowel or a h- in a weakly stressed word in the spoken language (1921-1940: §452). And further: "this phenomenon is...so regular, that it must have been clearly based on the spoken language [eine rein sprachliche Grundlage]" (emphasis DM). For Late Old English and Early Modern English the phenomenon is well documented; some relevant early instances are:^ — sum sar(e) angeald; on 3acm gold(e) ongitan; gyted(e) hine Beowulf (Sweet 1922) — all from Old English. — mostic, todeld it, madim, mighti (Luick 1921-1940: §452), öelder = öe elder, 'the elder', nart = ne art 'are not", tine - to âne, 'to one* kiddit = kidde it 'made it known' caldis = calde es 'is called' (Mörsbach 1896: §48). The same pattern, loss of schwa in hiatus, accompanied by phonological cliticization of a following pronoun or preposition, is frequent in the Peterborough Chronicle: henged up, smoked heom, makod he (wk. prêt, sg.), pined heom, bebyred him, Iced him (prêt pi.) (Clark 1970: LXV). Here belong also verbal forms followed by prepositions: bidceledd off "separated from",forrwunndredd o f f 1 amazed at",forrdredd off 'afraid of; adjectives followed by prepositions: dreorig of 'sorry at', gladd off 'glad at', hai off 'cured of, etc. Another group involving obligatory elision, and attested very early, is the group of "formulaic" expressions: mid sac and mid socne (tenth century, Dahl 1936: 15); chele 7 Srisst, sune 7 mone, hete 7 nid, kare 7 serrge, depe7 derne, lefe 7 dere, etc. — the latter are examples from The Ormulum, where the consistent metrical pattern makes elision of -e in the first word of the pairs obligatory (Burchfield 1956). There are also some pairs in this text in which the elision is graphic as well as metrical: witter and war, mor and mor; wid and fer, cf. also puruh sor 7 scheome (356) in the The Ancrene Riwle^ 6.1.2. Schwa loss in non-major class words Schwa loss occurs also early (in the course of the twelfth century) in non-major class words: Sen/dan, OE öenne/öanne, whenlwhan, OE hwennelhwanne, son, OE sone, ges OE gese, as well as in the inflected forms of pronouns: an, min, hir, your, etc. (Luick 1921-1940: §454; Crook 1974: §150-152). Words of French origin which would be unstressed in combination with a proper name, e.g. sir, dam.frer (Luick 1921-1940: §461) exhibit the same prosodie behavior. This type of loss is illustrated below:

Early schwa loss data 157 pat mon bi me hine bip» enche 'that one through me starts thinking'

(871)

Vor hwanne hin longep, ich hin singe 'for when he desires, I sing to him'

(890)

Vor wane^ pu sittest on pine rise 'for when you sit on your branch'

(894)

Ne weneö na man for pi pipinge... (901) 'Nor does anyone believe for your piping (The Owl and the Nightingale) he wi