Klaić’s Pedagogical Attempt in Accentology

Numerous accent “types” listed in detail for the first time in the works of Đ. Daničić motivated many works in accentology during the 20th century. Their primary aim was to render accent typology simpler and clearer and to warn about the (non)currentness of the prosodic patterns that were copied and passed on in literature for a long time. Inapplicable in a wider context, Daničić’s accent typology motivated Klaić’s (1963) attempt to reduce the number of types, starting with the shifting of stress to the proclitic, referring to the history of the language and the dialects. Due to the fact that the shift of stress to the proclitic requires a good knowledge of the history of the language, this contraction does not seem widely usable. However, it certainly raises currently relevant questions: the issue of stress shifting to the proclitic and the question of the number of patterns of the variable accentual type. By analysing Klaić’s accent typology, which arises from his work, we want to show how much it moved away from Daničić’s typology and how close it is to today’s outlines