Lexical phonology and the history of English - McMahon, April M. S. 1964- (Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Includes bibliographical references (pages 286-301) and index
Preliminaries; Contents; Acknowledgements; 1 The rôle of history; 2 Constraining the model: current controversies in Lexical Phonology; 3 Applying the constraints: the Modern English Vowel Shift Rule; 4 Synchrony, diachrony and Lexical Phonology: the Scottish Vowel Length Rule; 5 Dialect differentiation in Lexical Phonology: the unwelcome effects of underspecification; 6 English /r/; Bibliography; Index
This book analyses some differences between English, Scottish and American accents of English, shows how they developed and why they have their current form. Although the revised version of lexical phonology presented here is intended to describe present-day patterns, it shows how historical sound changes gave rise to these patterns