All the papers collected in this volume pay careful attention to the demands of contemporary historical linguistics on the one hand and philology on the other. That is, the papers are poised between diachronic and synchronic; between an acute awareness of real and ostensible linguistic change and the theoretical compulsions of uniformitarianism; between the twin challenges provided by those narratives which describe linguistic history and the textual fidelities vital to sustain a vibrant philology. The fruitful analytical tensions caused by such demands are seen to clear effect in R. D. Fulk’s contribution here.

Fulk offers a scrupulous analysis of some Anglian features in late West Saxon. He shows that earlier hypotheses as to the history, form and occurrence of these features need re-examination, largely because there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ description that would account for the distribution of those Anglian features in late West Saxon (lWS) prose. Instead, the occurrence of such features may be ascribed to:

1. the existence of Anglian originals which underwent successive recensions or redactions in (l)WS;

2. a possible ‘Anglian prose tradition before Alfred in which the occasional use of poetic terms was deemed appropriate to homiletic prose’;

3. that the scribes recording lWS prose were Mercian by birth, and that therefore Mercian features were native to them;

4. the fact that in lWS we might (on sociolinguistic grounds) expect there to be ‘a constant flux of both additions and deletions of Anglian features’. Fulk draws a somewhat telling parallel here with the forms of modern English dialects, none of which are in any describable sense ‘uniform’.

The chapter, then, consists of a review of the evidence for 1–4 above, proceeding particularly carefully in its identification of Anglian features as these occur (or do not occur) in parallel texts, before concluding that the ‘flux’ hypothesis – 4 – would prima facie seem best to represent the linguistic position pertaining in the extant lWS texts, this view gaining in theoretical legitimacy by its underpinning in the uniformitarian principle (Labov 1972; see also Fulk, this volume, p. 65 and note 3).

The survival or non-survival into Middle English (ME) of those metrical principles constraining the classical Old English (OE) alliterative verse-line has been a particularly problematic area both for metrics and (in its role as theoretical explanandum-provider for metrics) for historical linguistics. Given the appearance of English thirteenth- and fourteenth-century poetic texts which are alliteratively constructed, and particularly texts written in dialect areas which might very loosely be termed ‘westerly’ (see below), it would seem logical to seek for metrical continuity between those principles obtaining in the alliterative verse familiar from OE of the ninth and tenth centuries and those obtaining in later ME poetic texts from the twelfth century through to the end of the fourteenth. On the other hand, given the apparent structural dissimilarities between classical OE alliterative verse (particularly that familiar from e.g. Beowulf) and later ME alliterative verse (particularly that familiar from e.g. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK)), it also seems logical to seek an account of metrical discontinuity. Those working from the assumption or concept of ‘metrical continuity’ have included, for example, Oakden (1930) and Mossé (1968), while those working from the idea of at least partial discontinuity include Turville-Petre (1977) and Cable (1991). The latter scholars suggest, for example, that one source of ME alliterative verse might have been the prior existence of alliterative prose which in turn looked back to the influential aesthetic model provided by Ælfric. On this last view, the appearance of alliterative verse in later ME is not so much the continuity and modification of an old underlying Verse Design (to use Jakobson’s (1960) structuralist terminology) but the remodelling of a new Verse Design from an older prose tradition.

The matter is complicated in terms of verse history by the simultaneous appearance in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries of English verse which is (or becomes) more or less systematically rhymed; it is also complicated in terms of metrical dialectology by the persistence of alliterative forms of writing in parts of the south-west, the central-west and the north-west Midlands and in Scots (in the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries) but vanishingly rarely elsewhere – a form of interesting diatopic variation (McIntosh 1989a, 1989b).

In this chapter …

In the last chapter, and as part of some formal work we completed on the representation and transcription of long vowels, we began to notice some details of the present-day variation that exists in the system of English long vowels. In this chapter we're going to say more about variation, and put ‘variation’ into a conceptual framework that will allow us to distinguish present-day variation (which we'll call synchronic variation) from those variations that seem clearly to be the products of historical change (diachronic variation). Although this isn't a book about diachronic phonology, we'll see that any account of synchronic phonology would do well to be aware of the history that underlies the system. (Further, many students simply are curious about, and like to know, how and perhaps even why their own phonology took shape in the way it did.) In terms of diachronic phonology we can't do everything in a book of this kind, of course, but we can analyse key processes and structures which play large parts in any reconstruction of how phonological systems evolve. Those processes and features we'll look at here are splits and mergers (10.2) together with vowel (a)symmetries (10.3). In 10.3 we'll begin to say something about what many handbooks on the history of English call the Great Vowel Shift, and will also notice that the concepts of symmetry and (chain-)shift might usefully be invoked in the context of analysing one recent synchronic change in RP (from /æ/ to /a/ in words such as cat) – see section 10.4.

In this chapter …

In this chapter we look in more detail at how English syllables are structured. We take some terms and concepts we introduced earlier – those of syllabic onset, nucleus and coda – and use them to describe the internal structure of syllables. In doing so, we see how nucleus and coda are themselves gathered into a higher-level internal constituent of the syllable, called the rhyme.

We observe that onsets and rhymes are the immediate constituents of the syllable. The immediate constituents of the rhyme are the nucleus and the coda.

Once we've established the existence of these internal constituents we also see that there are principles at work – principles possibly based on ‘sonority’, which we reanalyse as ‘openness’ – which govern how segments can appear in well-formed syllables (and within internal constituents of those syllables).

We also look at apparently onsetless syllables and suggest that in English, onsets may be obligatory, and that therefore it makes sense to explore the concept of a ‘zero phoneme’ which might fill an erstwhile empty onset position, as in words such as eye or egg.

We close this chapter by briefly reconsidering the notions of the optionality and obligatoriness of internal syllable constituents, and aligning those notions with a typology that might obtain in the world's languages.

The constituents of English syllables

In chapter 4 we claimed that we could think about syllables as containing constituents such as onset (the consonant or consonants that might begin the syllable), nucleus (the vowel at the heart of the syllable), and coda (the consonant or consonants that might end the syllable).

In this chapter …

In this chapter we explore a system for thinking about, and then describing, English speech sounds. We will see that there are important differences between the usual written system of English and how the system of sounds is structured – so many differences, in fact, that the familiar written system of English could never be used as a transcription of either the structure that lies behind speech or the occurrence of English speech sounds themselves. As we'll see, in order to work systematically with the sounds of English we need to analyse both the structure that lies behind speech (we call this phonology) and the nature and occurrence of speech sounds themselves (we call this phonetics).

Here, too, we begin to look at some of the principles that govern phonology: the distribution of sounds, and how they contrast. We draw an analogy between this system and the system, or timetable, of trains, and see that to study phonology is to study part of the ‘timetable of language’.

Written and spoken English

It's critical for our purposes to distinguish between the written and the spoken systems of English.