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English Historical Linguistics: Change in structure and meaning
Edited by Bettelou Los, Claire Cowie, Patrick Honeybone and Graeme Trousdale
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 358] 2022
► pp. 41–60

Chapter 2
The foot in the history of English

Challenges to metrical coherence

ORCID logo | University of Toronto
ORCID logo | University of Oxford

Dresher & Lahiri (1991) propose that Old English displays ‘metrical coherence’: different phonological processes are sensitive to the same metrical structure. We consider how English has dealt with challenges to metrical coherence. We show that the resolved moraic trochee, assumed to characterize the early Old English foot (Bermúdez-Otero manuscript; Goering 2016a, b), became untenable after the shortening of unstressed vowels, arguing that this stage of Old English, at least, requires the Germanic Foot, an extended and resolved trochee. After 1570 (Lahiri 2015) the direction of parsing changed from left-to-right to right-to-left when the number of Latin loanwords with stress-affecting suffixes had passed a threshold derived from Yang’s Tolerance Principle (Yang 2016). This change reestablished the metrical coherence that had been disrupted by these words.

Keywords: metrical coherence, Germanic Foot, moraic trochee, stress, Tolerance Principle
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Change in the early Old English metrical system
  • 3.The change in directionality
  • 4.The change in the edge of main stress
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 February 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.358.02dre
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Booth, Joshua J.
2023. Rethinking the Metre of Parzival: Iambic Verse for a Trochaic Language. Transactions of the Philological Society 121:1 ► pp. 91 ff. DOI logo
Yang, Charles
2023. A User’s Defense of the Tolerance Principle: Reply to Enger (2022). Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 145:4 ► pp. 563 ff. DOI logo
Yang, Charles
2024. Phonological Regularity and Breakdown. An Account of Vowel Length Leveling in Middle English. In The Method Works, ► pp. 237 ff. DOI logo

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