Palatalization as a Non-uniform Phonological Process: A Diachronic Analysis

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyse a non-uniform process of palatalization in the Mid- dle English Northern dialect, with the main focus on the range of operation of the pro- cess, its conditioning environment and the direction of the change in the four lemmas: EACH, MUCH, SUCH, and WHICH. The fact that palatalization was an active process in the North has been proved by 47% of the Northern texts from the Innsbruck Cor- pus of Middle English Prose, which have demonstrated cases of palatalization in the forms of the lemmas. Referring to the studies of a perceptually motivated sound change and observing certain correlations between the palatalization processes occurring now and in the past, one may infer that the scope of palatalization in the North might have been even wider.