Re: Various loose thoughts

From: willemvermeer
Message: 36398
Date: 2005-02-19

--- 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. 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.



W.