Frederik Kortlandt

A history of Slavic accentuation

0. During the last 20 years the study of Slavic accentuation has gone through a unique period of progress1). The rapid development in this field of investigation has rendered a number of older views obsolete and placed others in a new perspective. It has also created a gap between those of us who have specialized in the area and colleagues who work on other parts of Slavic and Indo-European linguistics and do not have the time and the opportunity to gather the necessary information from the scattered sources which are available. The difficulty is all the more serious for Indo-Europeanists who have no access to Russian publications because the fundamental contributions by Dybo and Illic-Svityc have not, to my knowledge, been translated. Moreover, Shevelovs well-known monograph (1964), which is so useful as a first introduction to most subjects in the field of Slavic historical phonology, can only lead one astray in matters of accentology. Thus, there seems to be a need for an introductory survey of the progress which has been made, especially in view of the rapidly growing interest in problems of Proto-Indo-European accentuation2). These considerations have led me to write the following sketch of the principal ideas and results which the research of recent decades has produced. As a starting-point I have chosen the publication of Stangs monograph (1957), which marks an era in the study of the subject. As I view it, the history of Slavic accentuation is not really difficult, but it is complex because of the heterogeneity of the material and the unusual abundance of relevant details. For this

LINGUISTIC THEORY, UNIVERSALS, AND SLAVIC ACCENTUATION

Tho outlook reflected in Gs analysis is that of struoturalisrn at its best: and it shares with empiricist vavioties of structuralism an agnostic attitudo toward linguistic theory and universale. This attitude appears in Gs reluctance to assign phonological features lo such prosodic oatogories as STRONG and CIRCUMFLEX, and in Ms skepticism toward the typological considerations that have traditionally played an important role in the field. Wo have tried to denionstrate, in the second half of this review, that such skepticism is unjustified, and that an approach through a richer theorotical framework is rewarded by new insights that elude even Gardes careful investigatioiis.

Accent and Ablaut in the Vedic Verb

Most scholars nowadays reconstruct a static root present with an alternation between lengthened grade in the active singular and full grade in the active plural and in the middle. I am unhappy about this traditional methodology of loosely postulating long vowels for the proto-language. What we need is a powerful theory which explains why clear instances of original lengthened grade are so very few and restrains our reconstructions accordingly. Such a theory has been available for over a hundred years now: it was put forward by Wackernagel in his Old Indic grammar (1896: 66-68). The crucial element of his theory which is relevant in the present context is that he assumed lengthening in monosyllabic word forms, such as the 2 nd and 3 rd sg. active forms of the sigmatic aorist injunctive. Since the sigmatic aorist is the prototypical static paradigm in the verbal inflection, it offers the possibility of testing the relative merits of the two theories, Wackernagel’s lengthening in monosyllabic word forms versus a static paradigm with lengthened grade in the singular and full grade in the plural. As I have pointed out elsewhere (1987), the evidence substantiates Wackernagel’s view and forces us to reject the alternative because we find full, not lengthened grade in the 1 st sg. form, e.g. Vedic jeṣam ‘conquer’, stoṣam ‘praise’. The only 1 st sg. active form with lengthened grade in the sigmatic aorist injunctive is rāviṣam of the root ru- ‘hurt’, which is clearly analogical. It is therefore reasonable to assume that originally the static present also had lengthened grade in the 2 nd and 3 rd sg. active forms of the injunctive and full grade elsewhere. Following Hoffmann, Narten interprets jeṣam and 1 st pl. RV. jeṣma as precative forms (1964: 120). The reason for this interpretation is evidently the absence of lengthened grade (cf. Hoffmann 1967a: 254). The functional evidence for the interpretation as precative (Hoffmann 1967b: 32f.) or subjunctive (Insler 1975: 15 26 ) is very weak, while the formal objections against it are prohibitive. It is therefore preferable to retain the traditional view that these forms are what they look like: full grade injunctive forms, which were interchangeable with the corresponding subjunctive in certain contexts and which could be interpreted as precative when the latter category became common. Narten assumes that the injunctive forms yoṣam and stoṣam took their vocalism from the subjunctive (1964: 213, 277). The model for this analogic development is lacking, however, because the subjunctive ending was -āni, not -am. Hoffmann attributes the alleged substitution of the injunctive ending -am for the earlier subjunctive ending -ā to the influence of the 2 nd sg. imperative: “Das Bestreben, den Konjunktivausgang -ā von dem durch Auslautsdehnung gleichlautend gewordenen Imperativausgang zu sondern, hat das Ausweichen zu -am, wodurch die 1. Person deutlich gekennzeichnet wurde, gefordert” (1967a: 248). I find such influence highly improbable. The use of the 1 st sg. injunctive for the subjunctive must be explained from the meaning of the forms. Note that standard British English offers an exact parallel in the use of ‘I shall’ where other persons ‘will’. During my stay in Dublin, Dr. Patrick Sims-Williams told me that when an Irish friend asked him in front of an open door: “Will I go first?”, the only reasonable answer to him would be: “I don’t know”. Compare in this connection RV.VII 86.2 kad

The origin of the Japanese and Korean accent systems

Abstract “The patterning of tone marks in Old Kyoto texts divides the vocabulary into virtually the same classes as those arrived at by comparing the accent distinctions found in the modern dialects. This means that the Old Kyoto dialect had a pitch system similar to that of proto-Japanese. The standard language of the Heian period may not actually be the ancestor of all the dialects of Japan, but at least as far as the accent system is concerned, it is close enough to the proto system to be used as a working model. The significance of this fact is important: It means that each of the dialects included in the comparison has as much to tell, at least potentially, as any other dialect about Old Kyoto accent.”

ON THE MEANING OF THE JAPANESE PASSIVE

AbstractY In her discussion of the Japanese adversative passive, Anna Wierzbicka writes (1988: 260): “The problem is extremely interesting and important both for intrinsic reasons and because of its wider methodological implications. It can be formulated like this: if one form can be used in a number of different ways, are we entitled to postulate for it a number of different meanings or should we rather search for one semantic common denominator (regarded as the MEANING of the form in question) and attribute the variety of uses to the interaction between this meaning and the linguistic or cxtralinguistic context?”

IE *pt in Slavic

Recent decades have yielded a considerable increase in the scholarly Output on historical linguistics. Unfortunately, the quantitative growth has not been accompanied by a preservation of qualitative Standards. Much recent work betrays a lack of methodological training and scientific rigour. As an example of the kind of work which I have in mind I will discuss H. D. PohFs article on the fate of *pt in Slavic (1980). Pohl adduces the following material:

On Derksen’s law and related issues

Dominant suffixes in Baltic and Slavic originated from retractions of the stress or later extensions and some of them arose in the Balto-Slavic period already. The retraction of the stress in Lith. dukterį may or may not have been a phonetic development.

Vestjysk stød again

While I claim that preglottalization is ancient and that non-initial aspiration is recent, Perridon maintains the contrary. Both the alleged reinforcement of unaspirated stops and the following suppression of aspiration in recent centuries are quite unmotivated and unnatural. In my view, the whole development of obstruents from Proto-Germanic times up to the modern dialects can be viewed as a continuous process of lenition.