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4 - Synchrony, diachrony and Lexical Phonology: the Scottish Vowel Length Rule

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

April McMahon
April McMahon
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

Introduction

A typically English dialect is one which preserves a reflex of the West Germanic system of phonemic vowel length, having one set of lexically short and one of lexically long stressed vowel phonemes … Scots dialects, on the other hand, are characterized by the disruption of this dichotomous pattern, resulting in the loss of phonemic length: vowel duration is to a large extent conditioned by the phonetic environment.

(Harris 1985: 14)

The process generally credited with this disruption of ‘normal’ English quantity patterns, both diachronically and synchronically, is the Scottish Vowel Length Rule. SVLR was first formulated in 1962 by A.J. Aitken (after whom it is also known as Aitken's Law), although its effects had been noted much earlier in dialect studies such as Patterson (1860; Belfast), Murray (1873; Southern Scots), Grant (1912), Watson (1923; Roxburghshire), Dieth (1932; Buchan), Wettstein (1942; Berwickshire) and Zai (1942; Morebattle). In this chapter, we shall use the history and the synchronic status of SVLR and related processes as a test case of the way Lexical Phonology can model the development of a synchronic rule from its historical antecedent. This will essentially involve describing Scottish varieties in their own terms; in chapter 5, however, we shall compare the resulting system(s) with those developed above for RP and GenAm, raising the issues of dialect differentiation and variation.

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Lexical Phonology and the History of English , pp. 140 - 204
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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