The Stress Pattern of the Latin Loan Names in Old English Verse and Substructure of Old English Lexicon

Abstract

In this paper, I would like to investigate how partitioning of the lexicon due to the different phonological properties of two sublexica in Old English (OE), namely OE native words and the biblical and classical names loaned from Latin, is characterized with the help of Optimality Theory. The goals of this paper are threefold: i) to explore the stress pattern of the Biblical and Classical names borrowed from Latin in the Old English period; ii) to compare the stress pattern of the Latin classical names with that of OE native words; iii) to find out how the Latin classical names and OE native words substructure the OE lexicon. The result of this analysis shows that the constraint ranking worked out for Latin loan names is also worked out for OE native words, but not vice versa. The constraint ranking for the stress pattern of OE native words is more inclusive than that of Latin loan names. In other words, OE native words and the Latin loan names constitute the core-periphery structure in the OE lexicon as far as the stress pattern is concerned. However, this does not mean that the whole OE lexicon is the core-periphery structure in other aspects of the grammar. Itó & Mester (1998) claim that the core-periphery structure of the lexicon follows from the stratum-indexed faithfulness constraints differently ranked within a fixed hierarchy of structural constraints. In this paper we will see that the core-periphery structure of lexical stratification can be obtained without recourse to the indexed faithfulness constraints ranked with the invariant hierarchy of the markedness constraints.