Re: [tied] Lith. Acc.pl.

On Mon, 30 Sep 2002, Miguel Carrasquer wrote:

> On Mon, 30 Sep 2002 01:27:34 +0200 (MET DST), Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen
> <jer@...> wrote:
>
> >> But in Slavic the acc.pl. is not acute, judging by golová, gólovy.
> >
> >The Slavic evidence only says it was a strong case with recessive
> accent.
> >It says nothing about the intonation of the ending.
>
> Perhaps I was misled by what you say in "Die Vorgeschichte der
> baltoslavischen
> Akzentuierung":
>
> "Mit diesen Regeln wird die ganze produktive slav. Akzentologie zu einer
> Art
> Valenzchemie, nach welcher jede Silbe eine positive oder neutrale Ladung
> besitzt
> und das fertige Wort automatisch auf der ersten positiven Ladung (und
> wenn es
> keine gibt: auf dem Anfang) betont wird.  Nach diesem von Roman Jakobson
> 1963
> ersonnenen Prinzip heisst es z.B. russ. golová, gólovu, ná golovu einfach
> deswegen, weil ursl. /gol~-/ und /-voN~/ neutral (d.h. nicht akut), /-vá/
> aber
> positiv (akut) geladen ist ... ".

Yes, that is terrible. I *reported* the Moscow doctrine (whose founder was
in this point Jakobson), and then went on to say it does not work, except
for productive forms. It cannot be pushed back into PIE without becoming
nonsensical. BSl. mobility is the direct continuation of IE mobility,
albeit in exaggerated form (skipping internal syllables), and in Slavic
mobility goes even further, being here extended to the extremes of the
accent unit of the sentence; this explains why initially accented forms of
mobile paradigms always have circumflex, i.e. falling tone: they simply
accented the first *mora* of the initial syllable (thus the circ. of 'son'
in SbCr.), and since accent is high-pitched the contour became falling; it
also explains the further extension including proclitics before such
wordforms and not before any others.

Jens