ABSTRACT
The range of descriptive labels in the history of English phonology is quite extensive. This chapter limits the discussion to a consideration of two conditioning phonetic environments as they affect phonological change in a fairly extensive chunk of English historical data. It attempts to provide something more in the way of a general formulation both for the affecting environments themselves and for the alternations they produce in the phonology of the period. The chapter utilizes the term 'before' in a metaphorical sense, of course, since we shall be making continual reference to the tenets of dependency phonology with its inter- and intrasegment compositional claims as outlined in John Anderson & Jacques Durand. It takes a detailed look at the processes which are traditionally labelled as Breakings and Smoothings as they occur before fricative continuants. Stressed vowel behaviour is much less simple to characterise before the non-nasal sonorants.
