Exaptation and English stress  

Oleh:

McCully, Chris

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Sciences (Full Text) vol. 24 no. 3-4 (2002), page 323–344.
Topik: Exaptation; Historical linguistics; Old English; Optimality theory; Primary stress; Secondary stress
Fulltext: 24_03-04_McCully.pdf (200.72KB)

Isi artikel

In this paper I examine whether the notion of ‘exaptation’ [Lass, R., 1990. Exaptation in language evolution. Journal of Linguistics 26, 79–102] has any application to the evolution of the English stress system. While the conclusion will in a strict sense be negative—there is nothing in the evolution of the system that could unambiguously be identified as exaptation in Lass’s sense—it proves worthwhile to enquire whether linguistic survivals (of the kind seen in the stress-patterning of English nouns, for example) are ‘merely’ historically persistent, or come to serve new functions (such as the indication of morphological class). At the heart of this enquiry is the idea that the residues of linguistic change may be re-cyclable, and that languages may behave parsimoniously with respect to structures they have apparently discarded. Three features of the English stress system are examined: (1) the notion of ‘default’ stress in English; (2) the longevity and productiveness of the primary-secondary (/ \) pattern on nouns; and (3) the stress patterning of English verbs. The last case is particularly interesting since it is arguably here that right-hand word stress comes to serve as an indicator of morphological class, i.e. for speakers and learners, the right-hand stress pattern (permit, V, cf. the initial-stressed, corresponding noun) comes to ‘mean’ non-nominal, while the linguistic origins of the pattern lie in non-weight-sensitive stress assignment in Old English. That is, the original right-hand stress of such items is arguably recycled, in a different mode of stress assignment, as a form of morphological marking. In the present study, data are drawn from a survey of stress usage [Thomas, H., McCully, C.B., in progress. Theorizing a Mess of Stress. Department of English and American Studies. University of Manchester, UK], and from an electronic search of OED2, 1700 to the present-day, from which a 500-token list of verbs is compiled and analyzed in detail.

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