Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-wg55d Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-05T03:47:20.443Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Accent and syllabification in Early Germanic: A response to Liberman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

Joe Salmons
Joe Salmons
Affiliation:
Purdue UniversityWest Lafayette, IN 47907
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Anatoly Liberman's recent article in this journal (“The phonetic organization of Early Germanic” 2,1:1990) contains a number of potentially important claims about the nature of early Germanic accentuation. (1) His major conclusion appears to be twofold: first, the syllable struture of early Germanic disyllabics must have normally been CVC.V (using “.” to represent a syllable boundary), because CV (and by extension therefore CV.CV) was not a possible structure of a Gothic word. Second, early Germanic possessed no lexical stress (“word stress”), but instead only phrasal stress. (2) These conclusions are at least provocative to those familiar with the massive literature on Germanic accentology, and this was no doubt their intent. In this brief piece, I would like to note several implications and possible extensions of the points Liberman raises and the conclusions he draws, but also to disagree on some points. My perspective here differs from Liberman's primarily in focusing not on early Germanic in relation to its attested daughter languages, but rather on Germanic vis-à-vis Indo-European and some data from the languages of the world, that is, typological data.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Germanic Linguistics , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , July 1990 , pp. 137 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Germanic Linguistics 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Auer, Peter. 1989. “Some ways to count morae: Prokosch's Law, Streitberg's Law, Pfalz's Law, and other rhythmic regularities.” Linguistics 27:1071–1102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beckman, Mary E. 1986. Stress and non-stress accent. Dordrecht: Foris.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beckman, Mary E. and Janet, Pierrehumbert. 1988. Japanese tone structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Bennett, William. 1972. “Prosodic features of Proto-Germanic.” Toward a grammar of Proto-Germanic. Eds. van Coetsem, Frans and Kufner, Herbert. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Pp. 99–116.Google Scholar
Campanile, Enrico. 1979. “Altirische Metrik und indogermanische Metrik.” Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 37:174–202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Casagrande, Jean. 1984. The sound system of French. Washington, DC: Georgetown Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Coetsem, Frans van, Hendricks, Ronald, and McCormick, Susan. 1981. “Accent typology and sound change.” Lingua 53:295–315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
D'Alquen, Richard. 1988. Germanic accent, grammatical change and the laws of unaccented syllables. Canadian studies in German language and literature, 36. New York: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Dybo, V., Niklayev, S., and Starostin, S.. 1978. “A tonological hypothesis on the origin paradigmatic accent systems.” Estonian papers in phonetics: Studies on accent, quantity, stress, tone. Tallinn: Academy of sciences of the Estonian S.S.R. Pp. 16–20.Google Scholar
Halle, Morris, and Jean-Roger, Vergnaud. 1987. An essay on stress. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Hulst, Harryvan der, and Smith, Norval, eds. 1988. “Introduction.” Autosegmental studies on pitch accent. Dordrecht: Foris. Pp. xi–xxiv.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Inkelas, Sharon and Zec, Draga. 1988. “Serbo-Croatian pitch accent: The interaction of tone, stress, and intonation.” Language 64:227–248.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keller, R.E. 1978. The German language. London: Faber & Faber.Google Scholar
Kortlandt, Frederick H.H. 1986. “Proto-Indo-European tones?” Journal of Indo-European studies 14:153–160.Google Scholar
Liberman, Anatoly. 1982. Germanic accentology. Vol. 1: The Scandinavian languages. Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Liberman, Anatoly. 1990. “The phonetic organization of Early Germanic.” American journal of Germanic linguistics and literatures 2(1):1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martinet, André. 1955. Économie des changements phonétiques. Traité dephonologie diachronique. Berne: Francke.Google Scholar
Murray, Robert W. 1988. Phonological strength and early Germanic syllable structure. Munich: Fink.Google Scholar
Prokosch, Eduard. 1938. A comparative Germanic grammar. William Dwight Whitney linguistic series. Baltimore, MD: Linguistic society of America.Google Scholar
Ramat, Paolo. 1981. Einführung in das Germanische. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ramat, Paolo. 1987. Linguistic typology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Salmons, Joe. In press. Language contact and accentual change: A comparative survey and case study of early northern Europe. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shane, Sanford A. 1968. French phonology and morphology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Suzuki, Seiichi. 1988. “The Indo-European basis of Germanic alliterative verse.” Lingua 75:1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Travis, James. 1973. Early Celtic versecraft. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Vermemann, Theo and Murray, Robert W. 1983. “Sound change and syllable structure in Germanic phonology.” Language 59(3):514–528.Google Scholar
Watkins, Calvert. 1982. “Aspects of Indo-European poetics.” The Indo-Europeans in the fourth and third millennia. Ed. Polome, Edgar C.. Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma. Pp. 104–120.Google Scholar
Wilson, Stephen A. 1987. “Metrical structure and diachronic change.” Chicago linguistic society 23(2):418–430.Google Scholar
Wilson, Stephen A. 1989. “A reanalysis of Oscan-Umbrian syncope.” Paper presented at the Linguistic society of America, Washington, DC.Google Scholar