On Sat, 19 Feb 2005 05:40:15 +0000, willemvermeer
<
wrvermeer@...> wrote:
>--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:
>
>> Let me add here that I think it would be exaggerated to call
>> what I'm proposing a refutation of the MAS conception of BSl
>> stress assignment.
>>
>> If we adopt Zaliznjak's notation, in my proposal there are
>> still roots that are [+], [->] and [-]. We still have
>> suffixes which are [+] and [-] (c.q. [+Re], [-Re]). The
>> only thing that changes is that the [->] suffixes become
>> optionally (and in my opinion originally) [->Min].
>>
>
>...
>
>
>It is the word "optionally" that is hard to reconcile with the MAS
>conception here. The MAS view holds that at the earliest
>reconstructible stage (which they assume was inherited straight from
>PIE), every morpheme had one of two inherent tones, either High or
>Low. Contrastive stress didn't exist.
Where is this theory laid down? I must have missed it.
>It arose as a consequence of
>the collapse of the system: the left-most High was reinterpreted as
>prominent (or stressed, or whatever) and it is only from that stage
>that it makes sense to talk in terms of stressed and unstressed
>syllables. The stress assignment rule was a sound law that brooked no
>exceptions or opt-outs. It was after the system of two tones broke
>down that particular morphemes could start behaving idiosyncratically
>and, say, attract the stress even in the presence of a dominant (ex-
>High) root. If I recall things correctly (that is not intended to be
>purely rhetorical), the MAS people are non-committal about the
>chronology of the collapse. So is Kortlandt (e.g. Proto-Indo-European
>tones?, JIES 14, 153-160). A few years ago Arno Verweij and I tried
>to see what happens if you reformulate K's chronology in terms of MAS
>tones. It turned out that most of the BSl rules still make some
>degree of sense (although one or two become strained), but that the
>Slavic section of the chronology becomes unwieldy (not to say a mess)
>without a concept like "stressed syllable". We abandoned the
>experiment because we had more urgent things to do.
I don't think it makes any sense for PIE, which surely had
stress (take zero grade, for example), nor for the PBS
soundlaws, such as Pedersen's law, which creates lateral
mobility _of the stress_ in mobile C-stems and oxytone
non-neuter vowel stems, or Hirt's law, which pulls the
stress back if the syllable is _pretonic_ and contains a
non-vocalized laryngeal [vocalized laryngeals _also_ have
high tone, so clearly there can't be a Hirt's law without a
concept of "stressed syllable"], or Winter's law, where a
vowel is lengthened if _pretonic_. None of these laws make
any sense if there was no such thing as a stressed syllable
in PBS.
The PIE tonal system, as far as it can be deduced from the
Greek and Vedic evidence, was very much connected to the
stress. Short stressed vowels had rising tone (udatta),
stressed long vowels also had (long) rising tone, except
when they were the result of contractions, in which case
they had (super)long falling tone (circumflex). Post-tonic
vowels had falling tone (svarita), all others were toneless
(anudatta).
Resonants (*m, *n, *l, *r, *w, *y) after a vowel (i.e.
diphthongs) had falling tone in Balto-Slavic, which was
possibly inherited from PIE. In that case, Greek has given
up the feature for *m, *n, *r, *l (e.g. in <poimé:n> the -n
behaves as a plain consonant, not affecting the tone, which
was originally circumflex as in Lith. piemuo~).
I can find no evidence in Baltic and Slavic that the
stressed vowel had rising/high tone. Dybo's law in Slavic
and Saussure's law in Lithuanian rather suggest the
contrary: a short stressed vowel had falling tone (Dybo's
law might suggest that svarita vowels had rising tone, but
this is not confirmed by Lithuanian). This looks like a BS
innovation, and it must have been one of the fundamental
changes that caused the divorce between tone and stress in
Proto-Balto-Slavic. The other causes are the loss of
laryngeals (both consonantal and vocalized) and the merger
of the *d and *dh series, leaving length (= rising tone) on
the vowel/diphthong before the consonants of the "plain
voiced" series. The BS tonal system (before the loss of H/&
and the merger of *d/*dh etc.; but after the elimination of
vocalic resonants and the loss of rising tone on a stressed
vowel) can be described independently of the stress, but
purely in terms of the segments involved (i.e. it wasn't
phonemic):
V\ short falling (short vowels)
V/R\ long falling (diphthongs)
V\:/ long rising (long vowels [Dehnstufe])
V\:/:\ (super)long falling (= contracted vowels V/V\)
V\H/ long rising (laryngeal length)
V/R\H/ (super)long rising (laryngeal diphthongs)
V\H/R\ (super)long falling (e.g. acc.sg. *-ah2m)
The effect of *d etc. is equivalent to /:d/ (or /Hd/, except
for Hirt's law).
The loss of the laryngeals/schwa's and the "voiced
aspirates" made these tonal oppositions phonemic:
V\ short falling
V/R\ falling diphthong
V\R/ rising diphthong
V\:/ long acute vowel
V/:\ long circumflex vowel
V\:/R\ long circumflex diphthong
The place of the stress was independent of this, and the
point of most of the subsequent soundlaws (Meillet's,
+/-Dybo's, Stang's; Saussure's) was to reinstate some kind
of correlation between (rising) tone and stress, either by
shifting the stress to an acute, or away from a non-acute,
or by eliminating unstressed acutes.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...