earticle

영어

This paper reexamines a sequence of sound changes, i.e. Old English Breaking and Anglian Smoothing, based on the representational account in Kwon (2004). With a battery of markedness and well-formedness constraints along with faithfulness constraints, and with the constraint-reranking mechanism, this paper shows that an Optimality-theoretic approach can successfully account for these two seemingly paradoxical sound changes in OE. The results of this paper will also show that sound changes like Old English Breaking and Anglian Smoothing, both occurring largely in the same phonological environment, have to be understood as non-directional fluctuation between two opposite tendencies and thus make a strong case for non-teleological sound changes.