Chapter 9 - Summary and conclusions

Summary

Chapter 9 gives a summary of the long-vowel shifts submitted to analysis, and concludes that the set of supposedly earlier changes took longer to reach completion than the handbooks claim, and that the constituent changes of the GVS started in the mid-thirteenth century. This corroborates the Early Vowel-Shift Hypothesis. Many of the shifts appear to have been combinative at the outset. Moreover, as there is a lengthy temporal overlap between the early set and the GVS ‘proper’, justification for treating them as unrelated processes is hard to find. Thus, if there was any ‘Great Vowel Shift’, it must include the unrounding of OE ȳ and ēo, NF, and the changes to OE ā and ǣ also, thus spanning a period of 700-800 years. Clearly, this Shift cannot be a unitary, coherent ‘event’ that lends itself to easy categorisation in terms of ‘push-chain’ or ‘drag-chain’ models. Closer analysis reveals a recurring set of relatively straightforward phonetic processes, i.e. raising, diphthongisation, fronting, etc.; attempts to explain shifts of this kind ought therefore to look for clues in articulatory, acoustic and prosodic research on modern languages in which similar processes may be observed.