XVIII Instituto de Lingüística

The course examines recent and on-going sound changes in English, including varieties typically overlooked in standard phonetics and phonology textbooks. The focus is on changes involving consonant lenition, vowel reduction and consonant-conditioned vowel shifts. The analysis of these changes raises a number of issues of general theoretical interest. The course focuses on three of these: (i) the influence of phonetic, and in particular auditory-acoustic, factors on the direction of sound change; (ii) the conditioning of segmental changes by prosodic structure, particularly involving the metrical foot; and (iii) the route by which novel segmental contrasts infiltrate morphology and the lexicon.

Students taking the course should (i) have reached an advanced level in their degree studies, (ii) be fluent in English, and (iii) have some background knowledge of phonological theory and general phonetics.

Background text: Harris, J. (1994). English sound structure. Oxford: Blackwell. Papers on specific course topics will be made available for download.
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