Fortunatov–de Saussure's law


Fortunatov–de Saussure law, or de Saussure's law, is an accentological law independently discovered by the Russo-Swiss linguists Filipp F. Fortunatov and Ferdinand de Saussure.

Overview

According to Fortunatov's 1895 theory, the verbosity in the "Proto-Lithuanian-Slavic" language shifts the stress from the preceding syllable if the articulation did not have an extension. Thus, in the word for "beard" in Russian and Lithuanian, the accent shifted from the root to the ending since the root had an intermittent length, and the ending is the extended length. However, in the word "crow" in Russian and Lithuanian the accent was preserved in the root since it is elongated. In Russian and Lithuanian the word had no accent shift since the ending of the accusative case has an intermittent length.
According to de Saussure's formulation of 1896, the accent in Lithuanian was regularly shifted to the next syllable when it fell on a syllable with a circumflex intonation, only if there was another with an acute intonation after this syllable.

Valence theory

According to the formulation of the Moscow Accentological School, in the Early Proto-Slavic languages, accent shifted from dominant short and dominant circumflex syllables to syllables with an internal dominant acute, and there was no shift to both recessive aсutе and long syllables that had a circumflex intonation.
For the Lithuanian language, Vladimir Dybo introduced a clarification to this law: "The accent was shifted from the circumflex to the next final acute. Without prohibitions. And the next, not the final acute, only if both syllables have the same accentuation valence".
In the future, the Moscow Accentological School, after a thorough analysis of imaginary and marginal exceptions to the de Saussure's law, cancelled Dybo's clarification and introduced a reduction in the endings of primary cases or Leskien–Otrębski–Smoczyński's rule.

Opposition

, Frederik Kortlandt, Rick Derksen, and many other linguists deny the operation of the Fortunatov–de Saussure's law in Proto-Slavic. Jerzy Kuryłowicz did not deny the operation of the law, but he rejected the tonological interpretation of the movement of stress on the endings: he believed that the shift of stress from circumflex syllables to the ending of the word is not caused by the acute nature of the endings, but their reduction.