Chapter 1
Grimm’s Law and Verner’s Law
Towards a unified phonetic account
This paper gives a unified account of Grimm’s and Verner’s Laws in light of findings from experimental phonetics. The Germanic stress shift and stress placement shift are separate phenomena, and I argue that Iverson & Salmons’ (2003) shift in ‘articulatory setting’ corresponds to the former, and that the shift in how prosodic emphasis was expressed, from high pitch to dynamic stress, set Grimm’s Law in motion, because a phonetic correlate of dynamic stress is higher subglottal pressure. Increased subglottal pressure induced aspiration, affrication and spirantisation in Proto-Indo-European (PIE) voiceless stops and devoicing in voiced stops. The voiced aspirates became fricatives, which were allophones of voiced stops; these fricative allophones later fell together with the main plosive allophones to produce Germanic voiced stops.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Problems with the traditional account
- 2.1The original IE/Gmc obstruent inventory
- 2.2Chronology and intermediate stages
- 2.3A unified phonetic account
- 3.Air-flow, pressure, voicing, aspiration and laryngeal specification
- 4.‘Germanic enhancement’
- 5.Remaining problems
- 5.1The voiced aspirates and fricative stopping
- 5.2Devoicing
- 5.3A Gmc consonant shift cycle?
- 5.4The prime mover
- 6.Conclusion
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Acknowledgements
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Notes
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References