Metathetic and Non-Metathetic Form Selection in Middle English (Critical Essay‪)‬

ABSTRACT Metathesis, a specific phonological development consisting in an alteration within the sequence of sounds in a word was usually materialised in the development of English as a shift of a prevocalic consonant to a postvocalic position or vice versa. The change affected various classes of words: nouns (OE brid bird), adjectives (OE beorht brigt 'bright', or verbs (OE irnan rinnan 'run', etc.) This type of change, especially frequent in Northumbrian Old English, soon spread to other areas of England, showing a pattern typical of lexical diffusion. The paper concentrates on the metathesis of the liquid [r] and the adjacent vowel in the early periods of English. While only a very limited number of words with Old English metathesis survive into Modem English, those with Middle English metathesis have proved to be much more stable, retaining the metathetic form until Present-day English. The evidence of the available corpora, especially the OED, confirms the hypothesis of the change being rather abrupt than gra dual.