On Stress and Accent in Indo-European

Bibliographic Data

ID2867462
AuthorsMorris Halle (corresponding author)
Year1997
Volume73
Issue2
Pages275
Publication date1997-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguage (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0097-8507 • E-ISSN: 1535-0665
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/416020
OpenAlexW2334149222
LanguageEN
Citations received31
References cited17

Roman Jakobson in memoriam, on the occasion of his hundredth birthday, October 12, 1996. The IE accentual system is described in light of recent advances in the understanding of prosodic phenomena. It is proposed that the IE accentual system was much like that of modern Russian or Lithuanian in that the accent was a distinctive property of morphemes, and words without accent received initial stress. A set of simple rules is developed to account for this stress distribution. Since the theory predicts that loss of lexical accent should result in initial stress, the initial stress found, for example in Celtic, Germanic, and Italic, is attributed to this loss. A series of natural steps is outlined to account for the further evolution of a system with initial stress into one with noninitial stress of the kind found in Latin or Attic Greek

Linguistics · Stress (linguistics) · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy · Psychology

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