Radiant Collaboration Abstract
The Great Vowel Shift and the Geometry of English
Can the Great Vowel Shift be modeled as a minimal-change reconfiguration of English under the growing institutional weight of printed forms?
Abstract
The Great Vowel Shift is one of the central events in the history of English, yet its timing, trajectory, and relationship to print standardization remain incompletely explained. This project proposes that the shift can be modeled as a minimal-change reconfiguration of the English long-vowel system under the increasing institutional weight of printed forms.
The paper introduces the concept of lexical mass: a measurable property of words based on frequency, orthographic stability, and presence in prestige-bearing contexts such as scripture, law, education, and administrative writing. The hypothesis is that high-lexical-mass words and vowel classes exerted anchoring pressure on the spoken system as print, schooling, pulpit reading, and London prestige networks increasingly linked written forms to spoken authority.
The empirical program would combine early print corpora, historical spelling variation, orthoepic evidence, and sociolinguistic chronology using survival analysis, logistic modeling, and corpus-based measures of lexical stability.
Fields and Methods
historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, phonology, history of print, digital humanities.
- early print corpus construction
- lexical-mass index design
- vowel-class dating
- survival analysis
- logistic modeling
Collaborator Profile
Historical linguists specializing in Middle and Early Modern English, corpus linguists, scholars of print history, phonologists, and digital humanists with experience in EEBO, Helsinki Corpus, Penn-Helsinki, or related historical corpora.
Validation Needed
- Refine the lexical-mass index.
- Test vowel-class timing against known Great Vowel Shift chronology.
- Compare predicted spelling-pronunciation mismatches with historical evidence.
- Compare the model with other standardizing language contexts.
Publication Posture
This page is a collaboration abstract, not a peer-reviewed finding. The research question is public so qualified domain scholars can evaluate the hypothesis, methods, and evidence needed to develop it.