ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

The purpose of this paper is to present an account of how the Proto-Germanic */x/ came to be manifested into various forms in Old English. I argue that this sound change can be adequately explained given the assumption that the so-called ‘lenition’ is in fact triggered by an assimilation of vowel place features. The key reasoning against previous claims is that the process of lenition, theoretically, must be open to all consonants, not being restricted to back fricatives in principle. Some positional faithfulness and boundary phenomena are also expressed by universal constraints and are crucially employed in the analyses.

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