--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> My feeling is that it's a very old principle: acutes attract
stress, and
> if there's a conflict between two acutes, the first one wins.
That's why
> radical stress overrides suffixal stress in the -yti type if the
root is
> acute. The rule may have been productive in the early history of
> Balto-Slavic and then (perhaps) again in Slavic.
If my memory serves me, this was suggested by Jakobson (even if he
spoke of the first high mora to attract the ictus, but since he
thought of the acute as of LH, it's more or less the same). But then
Dybo said: no, it's not the first high mora (understood in Balto-
Slavic prosodical terms) that attracts, but rather the first morpheme
of the high (positive) valency, the valency eventually reflecting PIE
tone (not PIE pitch accent or anything to do with laryngeals etc. --
tone like in true tone languages). (Indeed, if you and Jakobson were
right, there would be eg. no pre-Dybo (b)-words with pretonic acutes,
but eg. any a-stem (b)-noun is like that). And then, one should apply
Dybo's Law and Stang's Law (or Nikolajevisch "pravostoronnij drejf",
of which they've been speaking since the early nineties) etc etc to
get the Late Common Slavic picture. Unfortunately, few seems to
accept this. Kortlandt wrote in an article that he does, but he
professes something completely different in Slavic Accentuation, so I
don't know what to do about it.
Sergei