An Optimality Account of Stress and High Vowel Deletion in Old English

Abstract

Optimality Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1993a, 1993b Prince & Smolensky 1993) provides a very sound basis for explicating the intimate correlation between stress and High Vowel Deletion in Old English. In this paper, it is argued that three major principles in a rule-based metrical theory―Maximality, Directionality and Free Element Condition―can and should be collapsed into a single alignment constraint and that this reduction leads us to a redundancy-free system. It is also demonstrated that Optimality Theory, where the constraint conflict is readily anticipated, makes it possible to abstract away an invariant foot type―the bimoraic throchee―from the apparently variant stress pattern. Thus the metrical coherence is. achieved here without appealing to such a peculiar foot as the augmented trochee (Dresher & Lahiri 1991). High Vowel Deletion is then analyzed as a direct consequence of parsing, requiring no additional process. The present analysis draws heavily on the assumption that the vertical locality must be relaxed to some degree and a way of incorporating non-local parsing is suggested.