Slavic Accentuation

In The Prehistory of the Balto-Slavic Accent Jay Jasanoff offers a much-needed guide to the accentual changes that set Baltic and Slavic apart from the rest of the Indo-European family.

The larger part of the present volume is about Slavic historical linguistics while the second part is about more general issues and methodological aspects. The initial chapters contain a revision of the author’s Slavic Accentuation and a discussion of the Slovene evidence for the Late Proto-Slavic accentual system and of the Kiev Leaflets. These are complemented by an extensive review of Garde’s theory and an introductory article about the work of earlier authors for those who are unfamiliar with the subject. Then follows a discussion of changes in the vowel system, Bulgarian developments, final syllables in Slavic, early changes in the consonant system, and of Halle and Kiparsky’s review of Garde’s book. This results in a relative chronology of 70 stages from Proto-Indo-European to Slavic. The following chapters deal with the progressive palatalization, the accentuation of West and South Slavic languages, various aspects of the Old Slovene manuscripts, the chronology of nominal paradigms, and other issues under discussion in recent publications. The second part of the present volume contains a number of case studies exemplifying specific theoretical problems, most of them of a semantic nature. The synchronic studies deal with Russian and Japanese syntax and semantics, the diachronic studies with tonogenesis in different languages and with semantic reconstruction in Altaic and Chinese.

Why does the accent jump back and forth in Russian words like golová 'head', acc. gólovu, gen. golový, dat. golové etc.? How come we find similar alternations in other Slavic languages and in a Baltic language like Lithuanian? The quest for the origin of the so-called "mobile accent paradigms" of Baltic and Slavic leads the reader through other Indo-European language branches such as Indo-Iranian, Greek and Germanic, all of which are relevant to the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European accentuation system. After the examination of the evidence for the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European accentuation system, focus is moved to the Baltic and Slavic accentuation systems and their relationship to each other and to Proto-Indo-European. A comprehensive history of research and numerous bibliographical references to earlier pieces of scholarship throughout the book make it a useful tool for anybody who is interested in Balto-Slavic and Indo-European accentology. Written in a simple style and constantly aiming at presenting old and new opinions on the various problems, the volume may serve as an introduction to this complicated field.

The accentual systems of the Baltic and Slavic languages continue to intrigue scholars of general and historical linguistics. They play an important role in the reconstruction of the linguistic ancestor of Baltic and Slavic, but also in the typological study of accentual systems. This volume contains contributions related to the accentology of the Baltic and Slavic languages by leading scholars in the field. They discuss the accentual systems that are attested in Baltic and Slavic dialects and texts, and the historical developments that led to these systems. The volume further contains contributions on similar accentual systems and developments in other languages, such as Abkhaz and the Mordvinian languages. A number of papers also deal with the role of the Balto-Slavic accents in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European. The volume reflects the progress that has been made in the field of Baltic and Slavic accentuation during the last decades. It forms a major source for anyone interested in the latest developments and insights in the study of accentuation.

Ablaut, the grammatically conditioned vowel alternations found in e.g. English sing vs. sang vs. sung, is one of the most characteristic features of the Indo-European languages. The different ablaut grades seem to be related to the position of the accent in Proto-Indo-European. A good understanding of the relationship between accent and ablaut in Proto-Indo-European requires thorough analyses of the role played by the two phenomena in the Indo-European daughter languages.

The aim of the volume is to present the state of the art in current work on accent and ablaut in Proto-Indo-European and its daughter languages. The contributors analyze the interplay between accent and ablaut with attention both to theoretical aspects and to the specific linguistic material. Presenting up-to-date overviews of the models developed by various schools of thought, the contributors discuss a wide array of empirical as well as methodological problems, thus opening up vistas for further research.