Indo-European Linguistics 3 (2015) 42–72 brill.com/ieul On the Accentuation of Vedic -ti-Abstracts Evidence for Accentual Change Jesse Lundquist* ucla, Program in Indo-European Studies
[email protected] Abstract This paper offers a new explanation for the barytone and oxytone accents attested for the Vedic -ti-stems. The two accents are commonly taken to derive from separate reflexes of a once unified proterokinetic paradigm, and it is against this account I will propose the divergence is instead chronological: oxytones belong to the oldest layer of the Vedas, barytones to the younger. The diachronic change we observe occurs within the Vedic period, and is localized to the accentual properties associated with the suffix -ti-. Our philological analysis of the -ti-stems across Vedic texts will support the “compositional approach” championed recently by Kiparsky (2010) and Kümmel (2014) against previous approaches. Finally, I will suggest answers to the question of how the accentual properties of -ti- changed based on recent research into the lexical phonology of accent systems. Keywords accentuation – Vedic – ablaut – diachronic prosody – lexical phonology * It is my pleasure to thank the many people who have graciously given their time and expertise to the benefit of this paper. I owe a large debt to my ucla colleagues, especially Stephanie Jamison, Brent Vine, Anthony Yates and Ryan Sandell, as well as others who have given feedback and challenging (at times, very challenging) criticism and help during various stages of revisions, especially David Goldstein, Dieter Gunkel, Keith Plaster, Jay Jasanoff, Jeremy Rau and Philomen Probert. My thanks as well to audiences where parts of this paper were presented, the ucla-Kyoto Indo-European Conference (April 2014), ucla Indo-European Conference 2014, and Harvard University (Feb.