Review Article

Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Volume 29, Number 2 (Fall 1999) REVIEW ARTICLE Christina Y. Bethin. Slavic Prosody: Language Change and Phonological Theory. (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, 86.) New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xvi + 349. Price: $69.95. ISBN 0521591481. Frank Y. Gladney University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [email protected] Professor Bethin' s ambitious and challenging book has a chapter titled 'The syllable in Slavic: form and function' (12-111), one titled 'Beyond the syllable: prominence relations' (112-87), and a miscellany titled 'Theoretical considera- tions' (188-265). They are preceded by a preface and introduction (xii-11) and followed by end notes (266-301) and an imposing list of references (302-46). The Slavic of her title includes Proto-Slavic (up to the middle of our first millennium), Common Slavic (6th-8th centuries), and Late Common Slavic (9th- 12th centuries). Chapter 1 is concerned with the development of diphthongal syllable rhymes. Displaying an encyclopedic knowledge of the Slavistic literature, Bethin reviews the history of how oral, nasal, and liquid diphthongs were monophthongized, recasting it in the framework of autosegmental phonology. These syllable rhymes, she argues, were shaped by the interplay of various constraints on syllable structure. 'Proto-Slavic had a front/back, a high/nonhigh, and a long/short opposition in vowels', quite traditionally begins the section titled 'Monophthongization' (39). These features defined a square system with four vowels: [+high, -back] i, [+high, +back] u, [-high, -back] e, and [-high, +back] o. Bethin and many other Slavists use the more familiar symbols e, o, and a for the nonhigh vowels, but I find e and a useful as a reminder that Proto-Slavic fused PIE *o and *a into a sin- gle nonhigh back vowel and so converted the inherited triangular system with three degrees of opening to a square system with two. The vowels being also long, they included [+high, -back] ii, [+high, -i-back] uu, [-high, -back] ee, and [-high, +back] do. Bethin uses a feature representation for long vowels (7, u, etc.), but for discussing monophthongization I find a geminate representation more convenient. 1 Still in traditional terms, Bethin continues: 'There were oral diphthongs (ei, eu, oi, ou), nasal diphthongs (in, im, en, em, un, um, on, om), and eight liquid diphthongs (//, ir, ul, ur, el, er, ol, ar)\ (I have substituted my vowel symbols for hers.) But as we read on we become aware of the author's ambivalence on the subject of diphthongs. A diphthong is commonly understood to be two sonorants in the same syllable nucleus; for example, monosyllabic E proud consists of an 1 2 2 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 29:2 (Fall 1999) onset pr, a diphthongal nucleus on, and a coda d. A Proto-Slavic example would be the last syllable of *ko.zi-lent 'kid' (nom. sg.; I mark syllable boundaries with '.'), which comes down to us as OCS kozllg. The derivation of the nasal vowel £ from ent is traditionally related to the Law of Open Syllables and the Law of Ris- ing Sonority, two laws that Bethin would supercede with her contraints-based approach. The former may be said to account for the loss of the syllable-final obstruent, lent > len, the latter for the monophthongization of Jen to -Ip. Bethin would relate the loss of the syllable-final obstruent to what she calls the Moraic Constraint ('Syllables must end in a moraic segment', 28) and the monophthongization of len to -Igto a No Coda Constraint ('Syllables do not have codas', 39). But the reason intermediate len ended in a moraic segment, i.e., a sonorant, is that the nonmoraic segment, i.e., the obstruent, had been lost. As for the monophthongization of len, this syllable being already codaless, it shouldn't have been affected by a No Coda Constraint. But my equating moraicity with sonority may be wrong. Bethin writes that nasal sonorants when they occurred in syllable codas could be nonmoraic. Her example is the infinitive form *uu.zim.tei 'to take up', which yields OCS vuz?ti. She explains: '[W]hen nonmoraic nasals occurred in the syllable coda, they con- stituted violations of the emerging Moraic Constraint in Proto-Slavic. So the nasal acquired a mora, creating a diphthong' (44). In the preceding section dealing with oral diphthongs, Bethin claims that even i and u could constitute the coda of a syllable,^ e.g., in *snoi.gos 'snow' and *tou.ros 'bull' (OCS snegu, turu), and that subsequently there was a 'mov[e of] the sonorant coda into a mora-bearing position in accordance with the Moraic Constraint'. Even after we correct the obvious keyboarding error and read '... in accordance with the No Coda Con- straint' (43), we are left with an unclear picture of how Bethin understands syllable structure. It seems the final sonorant in zim, initially nonmoraic, forms a diphthong with i when it becomes moraic, even while remaining in the coda, while on the other hand the final sonorant in snoi, presumably already moraic because it is a vowel, shifted from the coda to 'a mora-bearing position' (the nucleus?). A constraint-based approach shifts attention from what sound changes occurred to why certain sound changes were favored over others. But Bethin does not neglect what she believes actually took place on the segmental and moraic tiers when *snoi.gos, *tou.ros, *ko.zi.lent, etc. monophthongized (39). [T]he features associated with the second part of the diphthong, whether [high] in lil and lul or [nasal] in the case of vowel plus nasal sequences, were no longer represented in a separate position in the syllable, yet total syllable quantity remained the same: two-mora nuclei were retained. The retention of a mora in such cases may be seen as the reassociation of that mora to a tautosyllabic segment by mora conservation or a faithfulness constraint on total syllable weight. Mora conservation within the domain of the syllable was a critical feature of Common Slavic since total syllable weight tended to be preserved regardless of changes in the segment sequences. Gladney: Review of Bethin (1998), Slavic Prosody 123 In case this was not clear enough, a few pages later she adds (43): Monopththongization did not eliminate moras (for the resulting vowels were long), but it did have an effect on the sequencing of segments within the syllable nucleus [sic]. In other words, changes in the diphthongs were independent of the moraic tier: the No Coda Con- straint does not affect the mora count of the syllable in Slavic. Mono- phthongization was not simply the loss of a coda [sic] or the loss of a mora on the glide with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel; the vowel resulting from this process was often qualitatively (though not quantitatively) different from the original diphthong. The features of the high segment merged with those of the preceding vowel and the original sequence of decreasing sonority was thereby eliminated. When coalescence is interpreted as involving two compo- nents of syllable structure, the mora and the segments or features, then vowel lengthening and the loss of the glide may be seen as being concomitant. I have no objection to autosegmental phonology, but I think Bethin' s commit- ment to it sometimes has her breaking down unlocked doors. What gives monophthongization this appearance of multitiered complexity is the feature representation of long vowels. Otherwise, ou > uu and ei > ii is simply regressive assimilation for the feature -i-high and oi > ee is mutual assimilation for the features -back and -high. 3 As for the nasal vowels, Bethin writes that in *uu.zim.tei > vuzpi 'the place of articulation [of m] became nondistinctive, and nasality was transferred to the preceding vowel' (44). I would say m LOST its (labial) articulation, becoming -consonantal, and nasality was spread to the preceding vowel, im > Ju. Then both segments lowered, > io (conditioned by nasality), and the second segment assimilated for [-back], > ee. Oral and nasal diphthongs monophthongized relatively early in Common Slavic, and the results were uniform throughout the Slavic speaking area. They present less of a challenge to our understanding because the monophthongization of diphthongs and diphthongization of long vowels are common occur- rences in the languages of the world, as are changes like CVN -» CV. Liquid diphthongs are another matter. They developed later and owing to the geo- graphic expansion of Slavic speakers in the first millennium show a wide range of reflexes. For example, *gor.dos 'enclosed place' is reflected as gradu in Old Church Slavonic and elsewhere in what Bethin calls South Central Slavic, as gorod in Russian (her (North) East Slavic), and as grod, gen. sg. grodu, in Polish (her (North) West Slavic). As for tautosyllabic VR being a diphthong, the non- Slavist may wonder how the first syllable rhyme in *gor.dos merits this analysis any more than, say, the first syllable rhyme of E Gor.don. On this issue Bethin sounds an uncertain trumpet. Speaking of 'tautosyllabic sequences of vowels followed by liquids, also known as "liquid diphthongs'", she states: 'Although I take these sequences to be syllable nuclei followed by a coda, I will refer to them as liquid diphthongs both for historical reasons and because the absence of any o 124 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 29:2 (Fall 1999) other codas in Slavic at this time does not specifically require a distinction between complex nuclei and nuclei plus coda structures' (47). But we must distinguish between complex nuclei and nucleus-plus-coda syllable rhymes if we wish to understand what Jakobson called 'Slavic diphthongs ending in a liquid'.

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