Early metrical and lexicographical evidence for functional stress-shifts

Abstract

Only three Present-Day English diatones, outlaw, rebel, record, out of the current 235-item list in Hotta (2015), are on record prior to the seventeenth century. Whether this type of functional prosodic contrast was inherited or innovative is controversial. We revisit the Old English metrical evidence for functional stress-shifting and present new attestations of verb–noun pairs in Middle English verse in an effort to establish if the limited inherited stress-shifting model survives, and, if so, whether or how it accommodates the incoming loan vocabulary. The additional verse attestations support the idea of continuity, yet the scarcity of data falls short of statistical verifiability. A search into detailed lexicographical information for 1200–1550 reinforces the hypothesis of continuity by documenting the differential patterns of borrowing of nouns and verbs, prefixed and unprefixed. Taken together, these two sources endorse a proposal that in its earliest stages functional stress-shifting was predicated on prefixation, and that the ongoing conflict between prefixal defooting and Align-L (Root, PrWd) in ME is a necessary component of the diachronic account of English prosody.

Opaque morphology and phonology: Historical prefixes in English

“… See Fournier (1996) for this very suggestion.17 Minkova & Zhou (2022) report that prefixation has been playing a role in the stress of English verbs since Old English, and that "there has been consistent lexical pressure to model verbs as a sublexicon with noninitial stress" with the massive borrowing of prefixed verbs during the Middle English period. They find that the proportion of verbs that are prefixed has gone from about 30% in 1200 to about 55% in 1500.…”