caa a22 4500 378891197 CHVBK 20180305123455.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161128e20041123xx s 000 0 eng 10.1515/ANGL.2004.209 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)gruyter-10.1515/ANGL.2004.209 Lutz Angelika Erlangen The First Push: A Prelude to the Great Vowel Shift [Elektronische Daten] [Angelika Lutz] Starting out from two widely-accepted views about the Great Vowel Shift, namely that the sounds affected by it were characterized primarily by the feature ‘tense' (not ‘long') and that the development was a push chain (not a drag chain), this paper seeks to explain the changes of the two Old English open long vowels /æ:/ > /ɛ:/ and /α:/ > /ɔ:/ as a simultaneous raising development of the two most open tense vowels. Based on evidence from several Middle English quantitative changes which shows that all Old English aperture correspondences between short and long vowels (e. g. /i/ - /i:/, /e/ - /e:/) were eventually changed in Middle English (cf. the reflexes of open syllable lengthening, e. g. ME weke /e:/ < OE wicu /i/, ME stelen /ɛ:/ < OE stelan /e/), it is then argued that this shift of aperture correspondences is due to raising of all long tense vowels by late Middle English. Further, it is argued that the early raising of the two most open vowels /æ:/ > /ɛ:/ and /α:/ > /ɔ:/ initiated this raising development which eventually resulted in the Great Vowel Shift of all long tense vowels. Thus, the simultaneous raising of OE /æ:/ > /ɛ:/ and /α:/ > /ɔ:/ may be viewed as a prelude to the Great Vowel Shift. © Max Niemeyer Verlag GmbH, Tübingen 2003 Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG 122/2(2004-11-23), 209-224 0340-5222 122:2<209 2004 122 ANGL https://doi.org/10.1515/ANGL.2004.209 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1515/ANGL.2004.209 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Lutz Angelika Erlangen NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG 122/2(2004-11-23), 209-224 0340-5222 122:2<209 2004 122 ANGL CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-gruyter