Article
Refine
Document Type
- Article (2) (remove)
Language
- English (2)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (2)
Keywords
- Proto-Slavic (2) (remove)
The loss and restoration of the phoneme /j/ plays a major role in the development of Proto-Slavic. After vowel contraction in posttonic syllables, Dybo’s law, and the rise of new /j/ in east, South, and West Slavic, contracted and uncontracted forms may have coexisted during a considerable period of time. After Dybo’s law we have *voļȃ < *vòlja "will" but *rolьjà < *orlь̀ja "plowland", after contraction *roļá in Slovincian rolåu, Old Polish rolå. The loss of distinctive tone yielded merger of the two paradigms, as a result of which most nouns of the former type adopted the accentuation of the latter. Slavic deverbal ja-stems are original proterodynamic ī/jē-stems. The proterodynamic nouns *dūšà (c) "soul" and *zorjà (c) "dawn" have probably preserved the original accentuation. The other proterodynamic jā-stems evidently adopted the accent pattern of the deverbal ā-stems.
The article analyzes the accentuation of western South Slavic l-participles of verbal stems ending in an occlusive that are formed by adding the formant *-l- directly to the stem, e.g. *nes-lъ, Croatian nȅsao, Slovene nesel. Data from Slovene, Čakavian, Kajkavian and Štokavian dialects are compared and discussed against the background of late Proto-Slavic and early dialectal accentual and phonological changes. The operation of accentological changes such as Dybo’s law, Stang’s law and the rise of the neocircumflex, as well as the reduction of weak jers caused alternations in tone, vowel-length and position of the ictus. These alterations could be analogically eliminated or extended at different times and in different areas during the linguistic history of western South Slavic, thus causing the rise of some of the earliest isoglosses in the area in which western South Slavic is spoken.