Alliteration and Sound Change in Early English. By Donka Minkova. Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, 101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. xix + 400. $90.

For those who study and teach the history of the English language, it is a welcome occasion when a scholar who has contributed as much to the discipline as Donka Minkova turns the light of her formidable learning and clearheaded linguistic judgment toward some of the darker recesses of the complicated history of sound changes in Old and Middle English. The hallmark of Minkova's distinguished body of work in English historical linguistics is the judicious use of theoretical sophistication grounded in sound philology, and so one of the virtues of this new book is the pitch-perfect use of contemporary theoretical analyses to fashion plausible explanations of data-specific problems in the history of the English language. The importance Minkova accords to Old and Middle English alliterative verse as her data source is noteworthy, even surprising, since in the past she has written (with Robert Stockwell, "Syllable Weight, Prosody, and Meter in Old English," Diachronica, 11 [1994] 60) that "[t]he little evidence that verse structure may provide for the phonological rules of Old English is uninformative." And although Minkova maintains this stance for some properties of verse that are not her concern in Alliteration and Sound Change in Early English—such as syllable weight and resolution in Old English (the target of her earlier pronouncement)—she demonstrates, with overwhelming mastery, the use of verse evidence as a phonological heuristic schema in English historical linguistics.


Christopher M. Cain
Towson University