| dc.description.abstract | The paper provides a brief overview of existing research on continuous accent systems and highlights past findings. Building on these insights the author makes suggestions for further consideration as well as proposes some new solutions. The discussion includes typological comparisons and an overview of possible phonetic mechanisms as factors that have pushed the Slavic accent system from the inherited Proto-Slavic to the various fixed-accent systems. In the proposed solutions, the starting point is the systemic changes of inherent properties in the Slavic prosodic system at the word level, without initially seeking external causes in language contact. However, this does not exclude the possibility that language contact played a role, but according to the principles of the comparative method, the possibilities of internal explanation are to be exhausted before resorting to external causes.The following points recapitulate the proposals in this paper:
1. As a general observation, Proto-Slavic was a true pitch-accent system akin to modern Japanese, i.e., it contained word forms that are to be analyzed as accentless. As Slavic dialects moved from the pitch-accent type to stress-accent, the stage was set for fixed-stress systems to develop, which is a not uncommon outcome in languages of the world.
2. Two general trends have “loaded the dice” in favor of fixed-stress systems in Slavic: (a) the possibility of generalizing the default initial stress (“unaccented” forms) in Proto Slavic, and (b) the tendency to remove/retract final stress.
3. Some tendencies that were generalized in the emergence of fixed-stress systems can be detected in the connections between West and South Slavic dialects, including the evidence from erstwhile Pannonian Slavic. These include traces of intonational patterns and quantity relations that connect Proto-Czecho-Slovak with Proto-Western South Slavic, such as differential reflexes of the “old acute” stress (a result, in our view, of a glottal feature) as well as the possibility of an initial glottal stop as a relic of the prosodic shape of the “unaccented” Proto-Slavic word forms. This feature is seen in the Czech initial glottal stop (Cz. ráz), the české zpívání found in SW Bohemian dialects and which is akin to both penultimate fixed stress in Polish and Slovak (where it is in free variation with initial fixed stress), as well as rising-pitch patterns in Slovene.
4. Although in Western South Slavic (Slovene, BCMS) there is a trend towards innovative systems with distinctive pitch, which, together with quantity contrasts can increase the functional load of suprasegmental features, there is also a countervailing trend towards reduction of functional load by the elimination of quantity contrasts outside of stress (Slovene, Kajkavian, and peripheral dialects of Štokavian) and retraction of stress leftward.
5. The interaction of general Western South Slavic phonological trends mentioned in (4) with the morphological restructuring of morphology characteristic of Balkan Slavic has weighted the outcome in favor of patterns of generalized fixed stress, exemplified by Macedonian, which has systems of fixed penultimate and antepenultimate stress. In neighboring Serbian (Torlak) dialects the as yet incomplete trend towards fixed stress, i.e., a narrowing window of stress placement, can already be detected. | en_US |
