Article Title：On accent, stress and quantity in West Slavic
Abstract：
Among the Indo-European languages with mobile stress, the Slavic languages are distinguished by possessing, in addition to accented and unaccented morphemes, a class of post-accenting morphemes, whose cognates in the other IE languages are accented. The paper employs Idsardi's (1992) metrical theory of stress and accent to account for the evolution of this class of morphemes. It is proposed that the development of these morphemes was a consequence of Dybo's Law, a rule that rendered certain accented vowels unstressable. This proposition also provides a straightforward explanation for the striking fact that the West Slavic cognates of the post-accenting morphemes are exceptions to the otherwise pervasive vowel shortening process and hence preserve the original quantity contrasts. Since West Slavic (except for Kashubian) lost mobile stress many centuries ago, it has been proposed (e.g., by Garde, 1976) that Dybo's Law by-passed West Slavic. This common sense conclusion, however, is untenable in the light of the length preservation facts noted above. It is shown that the Idsardi's metrical theory of prosody allows for a full account of this complex body of data. The paper thus explains not only a hitherto puzzling set of facts, but also provides important empirical support for the Idsardi theory of prosody. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: accent; stress; vowel length; syllable structure; Indo-European; Slavic; West Slavic; Russian; Slovak; Czech; Kashubian; Lithuanian; historical development of stress and quantity; Idsardi theory of accent and stress; Dybo's law; Saussure's law
DOI: 10.1016/S0024-3841(00)00050-4
Source：LINGUA
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