Studies In West Slavic And Baltic Linguistics

This collection of twenty-nine research papers is dedicated to the eminent Balticist, Slavicist and Indo-Europeanist, William R. Schmalstieg in commemoration of his seventy-fifth birthday. It contains contributions by specialists of mainly Baltic and Indo-European linguistics which are reflective of Schmalstieg's own scholarly interests over the decades of his career, including technical aspects of Baltic and Indo-European phonology, morphology and syntax, etymology, language universals, the history of linguistics and the Baltic text tradition. Contributors include prominent scholars from the United States and Europe, both east and west. All papers are in English, and all linguistic material in less commonly known languages is provided with an English translation, making the contents accessible to a wider audience of readers.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks as well as studies that provide new insights by building bridges to neighbouring fields such as neuroscience and cognitive science. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

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.

This volume represents an overview of current research on Slavic linguistics in Europe and North America based on selected papers presented during the 6th Annual Meeting of the Slavic Linguistics Society (September 1-3, 2011, Aix-en-Provence, France). It includes topics across a range of linguistic fields (morphosyntax, syntax, and semantics) and discussions on specific aspects of Slavic languages within a typological perspective. All the papers illustrate a range of approaches, and each paper presents rigorous analysis of a set of Slavic data within the context of various models and aspects of language. While the main focus of the collection is impersonal constructions in Slavic languages, the book also includes morphological topics, such as reflexives, antipassive and evidential markers, syntactical relations with zero sign, auxiliary verbs and subordinate clauses, and semantics of nouns, adverbs and adjectives. The volume will be of interest to all scholars studying Slavic languages as well as those interested in general linguistics and linguistic typology.

This book is a collection of articles dealing with various aspects of the Baltic languages (Lithuanian, Latvian and Latgalian), which have only marginally featured in the discourse of theoretical linguistics and linguistic typology. The aim of the book is to bridge the gap between the study of the Baltic languages, on the one hand, and the current agenda of the theoretical and typological approaches to language, on the other. The book comprises 13 articles dealing with various aspects of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, lexicon, and their interactions, plus a lengthy introduction, whose aim is to outline the state of the art in the research on the Baltic languages. The contributions are data-driven, being based on field-work, corpus research, and data published in the sources not accessible to the general linguistic audience. On the other hand, all contributions are informed in the relevant contemporary linguistic theories and in the advances of linguistic typology. Some of the contributions aim at a more detailed, accurate and theoretically informed description of the data, others look at the Baltic material from a more theoretical point of view, still others assume an areal-typological or contact perspective.

This volume offers a discussion of the phonological, accentological and morphological development of the Baltic languages and their Indo-European origins. The first half of this book is about Baltic historical phonology and morphology and the second half is about Prussian. The emphasis is on the relative chronology of sound changes and on the development of the flexional and derivational categories of nouns, pronouns and verbs. It is argued that the Balto-Slavic acute tone was a glottal stop which developed from the Indo-European laryngeals and from Winter's law and that the original circumflex continues other vocalic sequences. Special points of attention are the gen.pl. endings, ē and ī/jā stems, and thematic and athematic present endings. The second half of the book contains a comparative analysis of the three Prussian catechisms, resulting in the conclusion that they represent three consecutive stages of a real linguistic system. It includes a discussion of the Prussian accent shift, initial vowels, diphthongs, infinitives, verb classes, participles and traces of ablauting paradigms. The final part of the book offers a full linguistic interpretation of the three Prussian catechisms on the basis of the preceding chapters, followed by a list of references and a word index. The book is of interest to Balticists, Slavicists, Indo-Europeanists, and other historical linguists.