Topics in the reconstruction and development of Indo-European accent

257 Pages·2002·5.48 MB·English

by  Kim

TOPICS IN THE RECONSTRUCTION
AND DEVELOPMENT
OF INDO-EUROPEAN ACCENT
Ronald I. Kim
A DISSERTATION
in
Linguistics
Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
2002
UMI Number: 3054962
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To my family and friends
ii
Foreword
It's rare for someone to enter a Ph.D. program with a clear idea of what he or she
wants to write his doctoral thesis on, and I'm no exception. Yet when the time came in the
fall of 1999 for me to choose a dissertation topic, I found myself strongly attracted to a
problem that had first caught my attention four years before.
During my senior undergraduate year at Princeton, as I was stumbling my way
towards (barely) finishing a less-than-successful major in astrophysics, I took a graduate
seminar on the historical grammar of Slavic. I had been interested in Eastern Europe and
the Slavic world ever since studying some Russian in the summer of 1991 before and
during a trip to the Soviet Union, but even I wasn't prepared for how eagerly I would take
to Slavic historical linguistics. What especially caught my attention in Russian grammar
was the complex system of stress alternations. This interest has only increased the more I
learn about languages such as Serbo-Croatian, which for both linguistic and extralinguistic
reasons has become my favorite.
That same fall, I successfully avoided my thesis research and improved my
German by reading Manfred Mayrhofer's article on the prehistory o fthe Iranian languages
in the volume Compendium Linguarum Iranicarum. Here too, I took to the material with
a passion, one that has been maintained under the surface over the years and finally
culminated earlier this spring with an article on the prehistory o fthe stress and case system
of Ossetic. Once again, however, it was Mayrhofer's brief discussion of the evidence for
stress in Iranian that intrigued me, in particular his comment that the difficult task of
reconstructing Proto-Iranian stress on the basis of a few scattered and/or not entirely
understood phenomena in Avestan and Middle Iranian, plus data from Pashto and some
other Modern East Iranian languages I had never heard of, was "perhaps comparable to
that in Balto-Slavic accentology."
These ideas remained in the back of my mind during my first two years of graduate
school, and resurfaced when my advisors, Don Ringe and Rolf Noyer, teamed up in the
fall of 1998 to teach a seminar on Indo-European accent within the context of the latest
advances in metrical theory. Don, a classically trained Indo-Europeanist, and Rolf, a
former student of Morris Halle, were both interested in the application of the footless
"brackets-and-edges" model of stress computation to the prosodic systems of Sanskrit,
Greek, the Balto-Slavic languages, and Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructible ancestor
in
of the Indo-European languages. Needless to say, this seminar did a lot to stimulate my
dormant interest in questions of accent and stress in Indo-European in general, and in
Greek and Balto-Slavic in particular. The following fall, I wrote up a dissertation proposal.
After one year on leave, two part-time jobs, two car accidents, two summers of traveling,
and thousands of pages of reading, this is the result.
Portions of the research in this thesis have been presented to a number of
audiences. A preliminary version of chapter 3 was presented at the 24th annual Penn
Linguistics Colloquium at the University of Pennsylvania, 26-7 February 2000. After
extensive revision, it appeared in volume 7.2 (2001) of the University of Pennsylvania
Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL). Chapter 3 has been adapted and only slightly
revised from that article, which I hope to submit to an Indo-European journal in the near
future.
Extremely early, poorly informed, and error-ridden versions of the Balto-Slavic
chapters were read at the 19th East Coast Indo-European Conference at the University of
Georgia, 3-6 June 2000 and at an invited talk sponsored by the Program in Linguistics of
Princeton University on 11 April 2001. I had the opportunity to give a less embarrassing
presentation at the Department of Linguistics of Swarthmore University on 21 February
2002. An embryonic version of chapter 4, particularly section 4.3, was read at the 26th
Penn Linguistics Colloquium at the University of Pennsylvania, 1-3 March 2002. Finally,
I had the great pleasure of presenting section 6.6, on the relationship of accentuation to
present and aorist morphology in Slavic, to the 21st East Coast Indo-European Conference
right here at Penn, 13-16 June 2002. To all of these institutions and conferences, I offer
my sincere thanks for allowing me the opportunity to present my work as it evolved over
the last two and a half years.
Except for chapter 3, almost all of this thesis was written in just over three months,
between early March and late June 2002. I was told in late February that I had been
awarded a one-year Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University, which was
welcome and entirely expected news, but meant that I had to finish a nonexistent
dissertation in time to graduate in August. I've had to cut a lot of corners and avoid too
much detail (especially in chapter 1), and the thorough research I've tried to make a
hallmark of my few publications so far has had to be sacrificed. Still, I hope the final
product hasn't suffered too much as a result — but that's not fo rme to judge.
IV
The last six years have been interesting and tiresome, exciting and boring,
memorable and forgettable, but the last two and a half years have been one unending wild
ride. I'd like to thank some of the people who've made this thesis and degree possible and
helped me to end my graduate career on a positive note.
My principal advisor, Don Ringe, has been a mentor for my studies in Indo-
European, and in historical and general linguistics, since we made contact in July 1994. I
sometimes wonder how differently my life might have turned out if I had thrown out the
piece of paper on which his e-mail address was written, instead of deciding to give it a shot
and introduce myself. Don was largely responsible for securing a fellowship for me in
1996, and since then he has done more than I can say to encourage my growth as a scholar.
Every page of this thesis indirectly reflects his standards of precision in research and
argumentation and attests to the influence of his example.
The person who gave me that piece of paper with Don's e-mail address was none
other than Rolf Noyer, my other advisor. I was already anticipating coming to Penn when
I learned that he would also be joining the Department of Linguistics there in the fall of
1996. Rolf taught my first linguistics class, an introduction to phonetics and phonology, in
the spring of 1994. I'm sure he remembers some of our heated discussions after class in
which I gave him an earful of my ignorance of modern linguistic science. Rolfs brilliant
ability to think on an abstract level, combined with his fervent interest in "real data" and
historical questions, have been a source of inspiration for me, and I hope he finds the
following pages not totally lacking in theoretical interest.
The third member of my dissertation committee, Gene Buckley, has always
welcomed my not always intelligent questions on phonology. His class notes and advice
were invaluable in the writing of chapter 1, which I hope does justice to his outstanding
teaching.
In addition, I'd like to express a special debt of thanks to two other professors,
Gillian Sankoff and Bill Labov. Although neither has much to say about the content of this
thesis, both of them have contributed enormously to my love for linguistics. A lot of my
thinking about linguistic variation and change from social, historical, and acquisitional
perspectives has been motivated by their seminars, whether on pidgin and creole languges,
language contact, dialectology, or sound change in progress. I hope some of their influence
will be apparent in the pages below.
v
I have been incredibly fortunate, particularly in the last two years, to be able to
count on my family and closest friends for support. Despite the definite risk of leaving
someone out, they deserve mention in print:
• my mother, father, and sister H(eidi), who are, I think, prouder o fme now than they've
ever been. I love you no matter what.
• the rest of the Kim family, including all the ones I've never met.
• my best friend Kevin, who's helped me in so many ways, and shared so many good
(and bad) experiences, for over 10 years and is now on his way to achieving his
dreams.
• Mark, my closest friend in Philadelphia, who has done more than his share of
commiserating with me over the ups and downs of graduate school and academia, and
knows (and has) what it takes to make it.
• my high school friend Gerard, who's probably relieved and bemused to see me join
him as an academic.
• my fellow grad students or "classmates" (I don't think I'll ever get used to the word
"colleague") in the Department of Linguistics. To Tom, Justin, Kieran, Masato, Uri,
Cassie, Na-Rae, Alan, Elsi, Sergio, Suzanne, and whoever else, thanks for putting up
with me, giving me plenty to laugh about, and teaching me more than a thing or two.
• all the professors and older "colleagues" who've helped me on the way, from my old
mentor and role model Franklin Odo to the Indo-Europeanists Craig Melchert, Miles
Beckwith, David Testen, Jay Jasanoff, Alan Nussbaum, Jens Rasmussen, Josh Katz,
Michael Weiss, Joe Eska, and Olav Hackstein.
• the folks who did the little things and don't usually get the credit: Jim Lavine and Stan
Cheek, who checked out books from Princeton's Firestone Library for me; Doug and
Marcus at the Bucks Co. coffeehouse on Sansom St., who shared many a work-filled
afternoon with me; my roommate Veronika, who answered with patience all my
annoying questions about Czech vowel length; and my students in Introduction to
Formal Linguistics, Introduction to Sociolinguistics, and the the Princeton spring 2001
writing class on language, who taught me almost as much as (I hope) I taught them.
• my friends, Penn undergraduates and graduate students and local West Philly folks,
who played such a huge role in helping me to turn my life around in the spring of 2000
with PSAS and everything that came after. To Mike, Tina, Matt, Reshma, Brian,
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Annie, and others, plus Alexi and Wendy, Christine and Joe, Ryan, Brandon, Maya,
and all the folks at the sorely missed Comet, thanks in more ways than you know.
• my Aussie Internet friends Kate and Ezza.
• Danijela, whose support and encouragement were so critical during the dark days,
when there was nothing I could do for her in return. Hvala za sve!
• finally, my dearest Anna, who makes me so happy.
To all of you, I express my deepest thanks, and hope that even if you don't understand
more than a small fraction of this thesis, you do understand what it means.
¡Hasta la victoria siempre!
Pobedicemo!
Ronald I. Kim
Philadelphia, 2 July 2002
vii
ABSTRACT
TOPICS IN THE RECONSTRUCTION AND DEVELOPMENT
OF INDO-EUROPEAN ACCENT
Ronald I. Kim
Supervisor: Donald A. Ringe, Jr.
Recent advances in metrical theory have opened the possibility of applying the
resulting insights to the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) accentual system
and its development in the individual Indo-European (IE) languages. After introducing the
principles of the "brackets-and-edges" framework of Idsardi (1992) and Halle and Idsardi
(1995), the accentual categories of the PIE noun and verb are examined and analyzed in
terms of underlying accent of roots, suffixes, and endings. As Halle (1997) has proposed,
the parameter settings for determining surface stress in PIE are the same as those of IE
languages such as Russian: stress falls on the first accented syllable head of the
(phonological) word; if the word contains no accented morphemes, it receives default initial
stress. The properties of the archaic ablaut- and stress-alternating paradigms, as well as of
thematic nouns and verbs, may thus be represented as the realization of different
combinations of accentual specifications: aerostatic roots, for instance, are accented and
surface with constant root-stress, whereas in amphikinetic paradigms the root and suffix
are unaccented, with default initial stress if the ending is unaccented and ending-stress if the
ending is accented.
The main outlines of this system, which is largely reconstructed on the basis of
Sanskrit, have been preserved in ancient Greek: despite numerous innovations, both the
parameter settings and the accentuation of particular morphemes survive in the noun and
the non-finite forms of the verb. In the Balto-Slavic languages, the complex alternations of
stress, intonation, and length may be derived without serious difficulty from PIE. In place
of a rightward stress shift from a non-acute syllable, Proto-Balto-Slavic has undergone
stress retraction to acute syllables; this hypothesis accounts for a number of previously
unexplained peculiarities. The accentuation of the Balto-Slavic nominal case endings
continues the inherited PIE distinction between "strong" (unaccented) and "weak"
(accented) endings in the non-thematic stem classes, which has spread to the thematic
Vlll
stems independently in the two branches. Finally, the stress alternations in the simple
thematic present receive a plausible historical explanation and shed new light on the
accentuation of this category in (post-)PIE; the relationship among present and aorist
formations and accentual paradigms in Slavic is revealed to be the direct continuation o af
classical IE pattern.
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