We are very happy to announce the next talk in the GK Colloquium, which will take place on Tuesday, February 12, 5 – 6 pm in IG 3.104.
Emine Şahingöz (Goethe University) will present “Ossetic Phrasal Accent – A first Approach”.
Abstract:
In this talk I will first give a brief introduction to the accentuation rules of Ossetic (described below) and illustrate previous research on the Ossetic accent. Afterwards I will present my methodology and plans for upcoming fieldwork.
The accentuation rules are relatively comprehensible: the stress in Ossetic (resp. the Iron dialect, as in Digor the rules differ), in separate words as well as in syntagmas (resp. phrases), depends on the distribution of strong (a, e, i, o, u) and weak (æ, y) vowels; the first two vowels in a word or word group decide the stressed syllable. If the first vowel is a strong one, it is stressed. But if the first vowel is weak, usually the second syllable is stressed:
|
1) strong-strong |
2) strong-weak |
3) weak-strong |
4) weak-weak |
|
xábar (‘news’ sg.) |
bíræ (‘many’) |
xæʒár (‘house’) |
fyldǽr (‘more’) |
Affected syntagmas are connected and share a single stress, by which a considerable amount of words appear without an independent accent (Abaev 1949: 10 ff.). In the Iron dialect an accent retraction takes place whenever the noun is definite: xǽʒar ‘the house’ vs. xæʒár ‘(a) house’ (Cheung 2002: 118). According to Bailey (1945: 15 ff.), in historical stages of the language, definiteness used to be expressed by the particle *i (< *i̯a-), which is still preserved in the Digor dialect.
The Ossetic phrasal accent does not only affect the immediate constituents of the stressed word; it can affect a whole phrase:
(3)
|
Iron: |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Wyrýzmæg |
ys-xíz-y |
Sadénǯyz–y |
⁀ |
kalač-y |
⁀ |
mæsyǯ–y |
⁀ |
sær-mæ |
|
PN |
pv-climb-3sg.prs |
black_sea-gen |
|
city-gen |
|
tower-gen |
|
head-dat |
In the colloquium, I will propose theories on how the Iron dialect shows the phenomenon of a phrasal accent, and how the Digor dialect does not have accentuation rules as clear as Iron.
References
Abaev, V. I., 1949. Osetinskij jazyk i fol‚klor. Moscow.
You are all cordially invited.