THE DEVELOPMENT OF VOWEL LENGTH IN SLAVIC

Though the importance of Stang’s classic monograph (1957) is generally recognized, the consequences of his findings have not yet been properly understood by the majority of scholars in the field. In the pre-Stang era, scholars tried to derive the accentuation of Slavic word forms from inherent tonal properties of their constituent morphemes. According to Hirt’s law, an acute vowel attracted the accent from a following syllable. According to de Saussure’s law, an acute vowel attracted the accent from a preceding non-acute syllable. Since it has now become clear that the acute was not a tonal but a glottalic feature, the assumption of inherent tonal features of morphemes must be abandoned and replaced by the reconstruction of glottalized versus non-glottalized syllables. The most important result of Stang’s analysis is that the Slavic accent patterns must not be derived from inherent tonal properties of their constituents but, conversely, that the tones must be derived from the accent patterns (1957: 179). Stang showed that the acute is characteristic of paradigm