Balto-Slavic accentual mobility.

9783110203974

Balto-Slavic accentual mobility.

Olander, Thomas.

Mouton de Gruyter

2009

274 pages

$123.00

Hardcover

Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs; 199

PG81

In some Baltic and Slavic languages certain words are characterized by a remarkable alternation between root-accented and desinentially accented forms. In this study, the author seeks to determine the Proto-Indo-European origin of these so-called "mobile" accent paradigms in Baltic and Slavic. He proposes that at a pre-stage of Proto-Balto-Slavic where the Proto-Indo-European laryngeals had disappeared, words originally accented on a final short or hiatal structure became unaccented. His hypothesis further states that, assuming that short vowels had a high tone or accent on the only mora, and hiatal structures had a high tone on the last mora, a high tone became low in the last mora of the phonological word. In order to test this hypothesis, he reconstructs the paradigmatic accentuation systems of the Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Balto-Slavic systems and compares them.

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