Lexical Stress in East Slavic: Variation in Space and Time

Lexical stress systems are known for their complexity and dependence on morphology. This thesis proposes a unified account of nominal stress in three East Slavic languages (Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian). When analyzed individually and without diachronic context, they seem to be unpredictable. In addition, most existing formal analyses of individual East Slavic languages omit some stress patterns as non-significant or treat them as exceptional. The analysis here employs single bracketed grid representations. Whereas analyses using Optimality Theory tend to incur some descriptive and theoretical problems, this framework enables an analysis that covers all existing stress patterns in the three languages, and sheds light on the synchronic and diachronic patterning of lexical stress systems. Tracing the development of stress in nominal inflectional paradigms from Common Slavic to the modern East Slavic languages shifts the focus from the Russian stress system, which continues to be the most studied, and puts it into a broader context. It is found that a historical opposition between accented and unaccented stems and suffixes, which became obscure due to a series of sound changes, has been gradually replaced by a new opposition between singular and plural subparadigms. This new opposition led to the emergence of shifting stems with stress patterns that depend on number, and to the subsequent reanalysis of many historically unaccented and post-accenting stems and some accented stems as shifting. Putting the burden of accentual contrast on the stem led to the loss of lexical accent from the suffixes. Since this tendency has not yet been completed and has proceeded at a different pace in each of the three languages, their stress systems vary in the degree of regularization, with Belarusian being the most regular, Ukrainian in the middle, and Russian the least regular. The introduction of shifting stems, which are marked in the lexicon as being subject to the shifting rules, makes possible an analysis which covers all existing nominal stress patterns in Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian.Ph.D