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1 Quantitative Rhythm and Saussure's Tribrach Law* Donca Steriade, MIT September 2017 1. Introduction in a 1884 Study, Ferdin

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1 Quantitative Rhythm and Saussure's Tribrach Law* Donca Steriade, MIT September 2017 1. Introduction in a 1884 Study, Ferdin to appear: Brent Vine and David Goldstein (editors) Proceedings of the 28th annual Indo-European Conference, Hempen Verlag Quantitative rhythm and Saussure’s Tribrach Law* Donca Steriade, MIT September 2017 1. Introduction In a 1884 study, Ferdinand de Saussure proposed a rhythmic law that would have functioned in the prehistory of Greek to limit the length and position of light syllable sequences. This is the Tribrach Law, TL, paraphrased below: 1. The Tribrach Law (TL) No word contains a nonfinal tribrach: *[…LLLσ…]Word (L = light syllable; σ =syllable) Saussure believed that only traces of TL were left in the Homeric language and later Greek. He assembled these fragments, dividing apparent violations of TL into infractions hystérogènes, violations arising after the death of the law and thus requiring no further explanation, and lawful original deviations. Saussure’s evidence was suggestive but incomplete. Later work, including Wackernagel (1889:2, 3-4, 20) and Szemerényi (1964: 4, 272-277) cast doubt on parts of it. This paper offers systematic evidence for TL, an extension of it to later Greek, and a reinterpretation of its contents. We start from an outline of Saussure’s own view of the law. To a modern reader, the striking fact is that Saussure recognized in 1884 that TL was a surface-oriented constraint: a dispreference against tribrachs that is independent of the strategies employed to satisfy it1. These included a variety of input modifications, (2.a-d), and morphological exponence changes, (2.e). They are unified only by the fact that all worked to eliminate the nonfinal tribrach, LLLσ. *Acknowledgments : I am grateful to David Goldstein and Brent Vine for extremely helpful comments that rescued a first draft ; to Juliet Stanton for the statistical analysis in section 3.2 and for comments throughout; to François Dell, Dieter Gunkel and Stephanie Jamieson for comments and references ; to Ryan Sandell and Sam Zukoff for getting me to look into TL; and to audiences at LSA 2015, WCIEC 32 and MIT. 1 “[U]n effort de la langue pour éluder le tribraque”; “un même résultat obtenu par plusieurs voies différentes” (1884:464) 1 2. Strategies to satisfy TL, after Saussure (1884)2 (L = light syllable, H = heavy syllable) a. lengthen an affixal vowel in nonfinal LLL sequences Vowel lengthened in /…LLLσ.../ Short vowel elsewhere h i. LLLσ → LHLσ sop -ɔ̄ ́-teros ‘wiser’ dēn-ó-teros ‘more fearful’ soph-ɔ̄ ́ -tatos ‘most wise’ dēn-ó-tatos ‘most fearful’ hier-ɔ̄ -sún-ɛ̄ ‘priesthood’ dōl-o-sún-ɛ̄ ‘slavery’ h ii. LLLσ → LLHσ idi-ɔ̄ ́-tɛ̄ s ‘private person’ ipp-ó-tɛ̄ s ‘horseman’ hɛ̄ liki-ɔ̄ ́-tis ‘contemporary-fem.’ toks-ó-tis ‘archeress’ h kotul-ɛ̄ dɔ́n ‘cup-like hollow’ arp-edɔ̄ ́n ‘cord for snaring’ b. lengthen root-initial vowels in compounds (but cf. Wackernagel 1889; and section 4) Vowel lengthened in /LLLσ/ Short vowel elsewhere h h h i. LLLσ → LHLσ an-ɛ̄ rep -ɛ̄ ́s ‘not covered’ ups-erep -ɛ̄ ́s ‘high roofed’ h p il-ɛ̄ nemós ‘loving the wind’ pau̯ s-anemós ‘stilling the wind’ h ii. LLLσ → LLHσ p loger-ɔ̄ ́nuks ‘with fiery hooves’ sūl-ónuks ‘paring nails’ c. geminate a morpheme initial C in nonfinal LLL sequences C lengthened in /LLLσ/ Short C elsewhere h LLLσ → LLHσ Pelopó-nnɛ̄ sos ‘Peloponesus’ K ersó-nɛ̄ sos ‘Chersonesus’ d. syncopate LLLσ (but see Szemerényi 1964:272ff) Syncope in /LLLσ/ No syncope elsewhere h h h LLLσ → HLσ *elut -e-men → elt -é-men ‘we went’ el-ɛ̄ ́lut -a ‘I have gone’ *theso-phatos→ thés-phatos ‘spoken by god’ tɛ̄ lé-phatos ‘spoken afar’ *theso-kelos→ thés-kelos ‘moved by a god’ theó-phantos ‘revealed by god’ e. substitute a H ending for the -o- compound linking morpheme in LLLσ Endings replace linking -o- in /LLLσ/ Linking –o– elsewhere h h h LLLσ→ LHLσ t anat-ɛ̄ ́-p oros ‘death bearing’ odont-ó-p oros ‘tooth bearing’ Pul-oi̯ -genɛ̄ ́s ‘born in Pylos’ Dɛ̄ l-o-genɛ̄ ́s ‘born in Delos’ In a different move that anticipates modern developments, Saussure proposed that TL was a phrase-level process, whose function would have been to adjust the lexicon to the needs of dactylic rhythm. He thought that the cadence of connected speech in pre-historic Greek – not just that of the poetic language, but of ordinary speech – was dactylic. Tribrachs had to be excluded because they couldn’t be parsed into dactyls3. 2 Saussure’s data is supplemented, including by comparisons to contexts where TL was moot. In transliterating, I use macrons to mark long vowels; I transcribe the dipththongs ει, ου as tense long <ē, ō>; and η, ω as lax <ɛ̄ , ɔ̄ >. 3 “La langue courante et journalière s’offensait alors d’une succession de trois syllabes brèves.” (1884:464) 2 Why did TL prohibit tribrachs only in non-final positions? In part because, Saussure argues, a word-final sequence of three lights, LLL#, can sometimes be incorporated into a dactylic HLL sequence: whenever word-initial Cs turn the preceding L into a H. A word final LLL followed is parsed as LLH if enough Cs are added to the last L to turn it into a H.[1] This LLH sequence can be distributed across two dactyls, HLL HLL. A non-final LLL differs because its weights remain invariant in all phrasal contexts. TL is needed to modify this phrase-invariant, word-medial LLL. Thus, Saussure’s explanation for why TL applied to only non-final tribrachs suggests that he conceived of TL as a process with a phrase-level objective. It follows that the statement in (1), *[…LLLσ…]Word, should change to *[…LLL…]PPhrase to reflect his thinking: tribrachs are bad anywhere in a phrase, because the phrase in its entirety must be parsed into dactyls, but word- final tribrachs can be avoided without overt changes, while phrase-final tribrachs are remedied by the independent process of final lengthening. While Saussure thought of TL as a phrasal process, his project in 1884 was to find word- internal traces of it. A phrase-medial LLL sequence that arises across word boundaries – LL#L or L#LL – can be avoided by different lexical choices or a different syntax. Any such prehistoric avoidance strategies would have left no traces after the law was abandoned. By contrast, word- internal changes like (2) could be transmitted to the later language, because the death of the law would not necessarily cause their undoing in lexicalized forms. It is then on these word-internal traces that Saussure planned to build his case for a reconstructed TL. Before Saussure, Friedrich Blass (1893, 1st edition 1868) had discovered a strikingly similar rhythmic preference, this time in 4th BC Attic. Blass’ Law refers to the avoidance of tribrachs across word boundaries, in the speeches of Demosthenes and his followers. This phrasal domain is complementary to that studied by Saussure. Below is an approximation to Blass’ Law, meant to highlight the parallels to TL: 3. Blass’ Law (BL): No phonological phrase contains a nonfinal sequence of more than two lights: *[…LLLσ…]PPhrase The means of satisfying BL are different from TL. We do not find in the lexicon of Demosthenes changes comparable to (2) and peculiar to him. The effects of BL emerge only from a comparison between the rhythm of Demosthenes’ phrases to those of his contemporaries. As the 3 surface lexical material is the same for all Greek writers, compliance with BL must have resulted from lexical and syntactic selection alone. Saussure took BL and TL to be unrelated (1884:476). The most likely reasons were internal to his hypothesis: he considered TL a prehistoric, input-modifying strategy that enforced dactylic rhythm. BL was none of those things. In particular, what Blass had found in Demosthenes was not a preference for dactyls, but just an avoidance of tribrachs. Still, the similarities between (1) and (3) invite a second look at their relation. We explore here a unified conception of BL and TL, on somewhat different terms from Saussure. What looks like a stylistic preference for Demosthenes can reflect the activity of a constraint identical to the one that underlies TL and (2). The difference between the changes that BL and TL induce derives, in an OT grammar, from a different ranking of a markedness constraint banning tribrachs relative to input-output faithfulness. The changes in (2.a-d) result from a grammar like (4.a), where an anti-tribrach constraint outranks faithfulness to certain inputs. In a different grammar, (4.b), the same constraint, now demoted below all input-output faithfulness, expresses itself only through lexical/syntactic choices. BL can be seen in that light. 4. Prehistoric TL (a) vs. BL (b) as Optimality Theoretic4 grammar fragments a. The grammar of TL proper (cf.(2.a-d)): *LLLσ >> Faith IO b. The grammar of BL: Faith IO >> *LLLσ >> syntactic/lexical preferences The focus of the present study is on a claim suggested by (4.b): the TL constraint, *LLLσ, was active in historical Greek, when Demosthenes began to systematically enforce it in phrasal contexts. This claim is suggested by any attempt to unify BL and TL. A related speculation is that Demosthenes, like any speaker of Greek, could reconstruct from the phenomena in (2), and others to be discussed below, an active TL constraint. In support of the claim that TL is active in historical Greek, I examine evidence that word- medial tribrachs continued to be avoided into the historical period. While most TL-promoting alternations in (2.a-d) are unproductive remnants at this stage, as Saussure saw, they were replaced in later Greek by subtler avoidance strategies, which Saussure missed: compounds and certain derivatives that could create TL violations are underattested compared to those that abide by TL.
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