A complicated relationship
Balto-Slavic accentual mobility as a non-trivial shared innovation
The Baltic and Slavic subgroups of the Indo-European language family are more closely related to each other than to any of the other surviving subgroups; yet it is debated whether they form a subgroup of Indo-European descending from a uniform Balto-Slavic proto-language. While most historical linguists do operate with a Balto-Slavic subgroup and a matching proto-language, others remain sceptical.
In this contribution I focus on one of the most salient similarities between Baltic and Slavic: the paradigmatic accentual mobility found in both subgroups. Following a discussion of non-trivial shared innovations as a diagnostic tool in linguistic subgrouping, I examine the Balto-Slavic problem in the light of three different hypotheses on the origin of accentual mobility.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The Balto-Slavic problem
- 3.The Baltic problem
- 4.Non-trivial shared innovations
- 5.Genealogically shared innovations vs. contact-induced shared innovations
- 6.Accentual mobility as a shared innovation
- 6.1Introductory remarks
- 6.2Pedersen’s Law, Barytonesis, Accent Retraction: Kortlandt
- 6.3Saussure–Pedersen’s Law, Proto-Vasil’ev–Dolobko’s Law: Jasanoff
- 6.4Mobility Law: Olander
- 7.Conclusion
-
Note
-
References
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