The accentuation of the cakavian dialects of Serbo-Croatian

This dissertation presents a description and analysis of the accentuation of the cakavian dialects of Serbo-Croatian, concentrating on the alternations of stress, quantity and pitch that occur in their inflectional systems. These dialects are of particular interest because they have preserved prosodic distinctions and alternations that have been lost in most other Slavic languages and dialects and they can thus serve as an important source of data for the reconstruction of the Common Slavic accentuation. At the same time, they exhibit a whole range of innovations that can help us understand the historical development of other contemporary Slavic accentual systems. The first chapter examines the phonological nature of the cakavian prosodic systems and the rules governing the distribution of the prosodic features in order to distinguish alternations that are phonetically predictable from those which serve a morphophonemic function. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the historical development of the prosodic systems and a summary of the automatic alternations typical of cakavian dialects. Chapters 2 through 5 describe the accentual alternations of the major parts of speech (the noun, adjective, numeral and verb). This synchronic analysis then serves as the basis for a discussion of the historical development of these alternations in Chapter 6.