Introduction

Summary

Slavic Prosody is a book about language change and language structure. It seeks to provide a coherent account of the Slavic languages at the time of their differentiation and later, and to relate some of the findings to issues in phonological theory. In demonstrating that many persistent problems of Slavic historical linguistics, such as the development of nasal vowels, the well-known but little understood innovations in the liquid diphthongs, and the various accentual changes may be solved in a theoretically interesting way by reference to the syllable, the book offers a new analysis and a different view of the Slavic languages. This is not a historical or comparative grammar in the usual sense, nor does it contain the complete individual histories or synchronic descriptions of the Slavic languages. But by exploring some intriguing problems of Slavic historical linguistics and their synchronic resonances within a contemporary theoretical framework, the study aims to engage both Slavists and general linguists, as well as those simply interested in the Slavic languages or in language per se.

Given that the objective of Slavic Prosody is to examine phenomena within the syllable and the role of the syllable within the word, it is particularly rewarding to look at how these relationships changed over time. The study therefore focuses on Late Common Slavic, the period of significant upheaval and differentiation of the Slavic dialects, but it looks at Late Common Slavic in relation to both its past and its future.