Issues in Balto-Slavic accentology (original) (raw)

2011, Accent Matters: Papers on Balto-Slavic …

After the very well-organized Leiden conference for which we must be grateful to Tijmen Pronk, it seems appropriate for me to review some of the papers, as I did after the previous conferences in Zagreb and Copenhagen. The aim of this review is merely to point out some of the differences of opinion which require further debate. Mislav Benić presents a detailed description of verbal accentuation in the dialect of Kukljica on the island of Ugljan. The dialect has no tonal distinctions but does have vowel quantity in stressed and pretonic syllables, with large-scale lengthening of short vowels under the stress. It has preserved the Common Slavic distinction between original pretonic long vowels, which were shortened as a result of the rise of the new timbre differences, and new pretonic long vowels which arose as a result of Dybo's law (cf. Kortlandt 2005: 126-128), e.g. jazȋk 'tongue' (with secondary lengthening of the stressed vowel) versus nạ̄ rȍd 'people'. It has also preserved the distinction between simplex verbs with mobile stress, e.g. budȋn 'wake up', gasȋn 'turn off', and compound verbs where the prefix lost the stress to the root in accordance with Dybo's law, e.g. prebȗdin, ugȁsin (ibidem, 127). Moreover, it has preserved the accentual mobility of the original nasal present in nȅ znon 'don't know' (cf. Kortlandt 1985) and the retracted stress of the original imperative in vȗci, cȋdi of vūčȇn 'pull', cidȋn 'filter' (cf. Kortlandt 1979: 53). Miguel Carrasquer Vidal proposes a derivation of acute and circumflex tones from the syllable structure of the proto-language. His account involves tones on unstressed syllables, resyllabifications, analogical replacements, ad hoc rules for different stem formations and for different languages, secondary developments, unexplained exceptions for which he posits a PIE distinction between *i and *j, and structural ambiguity of the postvocalic ending *-ns. He lists a number of Slavic Auslautgesetze in order to arrive at the correct output. Since I have discussed all of the issues elsewhere, I shall not return to the many points of disaggreement here. Vladimir Dybo compares the West Caucasian, Balto-Slavic and Japanese accent systems in terms of "dominant" and "recessive" morphemes expressed in syllables and contours. In my review of last year's conference in Copenhagen, I have shown how the class of dominant suffixes originated from several retrac