Thoughts on the Genesis and the Development of Syllable Cut in English

Type frequency influences phonological generalizations: Eliminating stressed open syllables with short vowels in West Germanic

“…There is good evidence for this closure in the languages concerned, as two examples demonstrate. First, through its meter, the 12th-century English text The Orrmulum shows unequivocally that nonetymological double consonant graphs add weight to the syllable, and in the case of formerly open syllables, such as <irrene> ‘of iron’ (Old English īrene -), this clearly demonstrates that the syllable is closed (see Murray 2000, Mailhammer 2007:41–42, 2009:268–269 for further details). Second, as is well known, stressed syllables with short vowels must be closed in Modern German.…”

“…OSL and OSC are thus different ways to implement this new constraint against stressed CV syllables, that is, two different paths to achieve the same goal, which is to eliminate stressed open syllables with short vowels. Which of the two applies cannot be fully predicted, although there are tendencies (see Mailhammer 2009:265–266). This may have to do with the fact that OSL/OSC are, in this case, changes triggered by a prosodic change, which itself is completely regular (new constraint: no stressed CV syllables; see, for example, Becker 2002:48 and especially Page 1999, 2007), or it may be that the ultimate conditioning factor(s) have not yet been found 3…”

“…Working within a syllable cut model, Mailhammer (2009) introduces a new factor to account for the typological classification of languages that underwent OSL and/or OSC triggered by a prosodic change as either OSL-prominent or OSC-prominent (terms adapted from Restle 2003:140). He suggests that whether languages belong to one or the other type is influenced by the number of available open syllables with long vowels and syllables with short vowels that are closed by geminates, that is, prototypically smoothly- and abruptly-cut syllables in a syllable cut system.…”

“…Although he does not explicitly say so, it appears that this hypothesis is motivated by cases like the ones discussed in Bybee 2001:93–95, which “show that it is possible for a phonological generalization to arise from frequency distributions in the lexicon” (Bybee 2001:94). Mailhammer (2009) discusses some limited quantitative data from Old English showing that 15% (273) of the words in the corpus possess a stressed syllable with a short vowel and a closing geminate consonant. However, there are no quantitative data for open syllables with long vowels or for any of the languages compared, that is, Latin and German.…”

REVIEWS - Einführung in die Phonetik und Phonologie des Deutschen. By Thomas Becker. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2012. Pp. 130. Paperback, €17.95.

“…Thus the description of the phonetic reality of syllable cut may sound somewhat esoteric, especially since there is no phonetic evidence showing that abruptly-cut vowels are in fact “cut-off” (Restle 2003:45–46). An alternative is to explain a syllable-cut prosody as a configuration in which syllable structure and segmental properties are interrelated (see, for example, Mailhammer 2009 and Mailhammer, Kruger & Makiyama 2015). Similarly, the concept of preference laws, presented in chapter 5, might need more unpacking for uninitiated and skeptical readers.…”