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Description:
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The larger part of the present volume is about Slavic historical
linguistics while the second part is about more general issues and
methodological aspects. The initial chapters contain a revision of the
author’s Slavic Accentuation and a discussion of the Slovene
evidence for the Late Proto-Slavic accentual system and of the Kiev
Leaflets. These are complemented by an extensive review of Garde’s theory
and an introductory article about the work of earlier authors for those who
are unfamiliar with the subject. Then follows a discussion of changes in
the vowel system, Bulgarian developments, final syllables in Slavic, early
changes in the consonant system, and of Halle and Kiparsky’s review of
Garde’s book. This results in a relative chronology of 70 stages from
Proto-Indo-European to Slavic. The following chapters deal with the
progressive palatalization, the accentuation of West and South Slavic
languages, various aspects of the Old Slovene manuscripts, the chronology
of nominal paradigms, and other issues under discussion in recent
publications. The second part of the present volume contains a number of
case studies exemplifying specific theoretical problems, most of them of a
semantic nature. The synchronic studies deal with Russian and Japanese
syntax and semantics, the diachronic studies with tonogenesis in different
languages and with semantic reconstruction in Altaic and Chinese.
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