About the course
Course outline and suggested readings
If you are not familiar with the basic outlines of Slavic phonology and morphophonology, reasonably accessible (but compressed) overviews are provided in relevant chapters in Sussex & Cubberley (2006) or the very recent Šipka & Browne (2024). An older, but very detailed and pedagogically presented source is Townsend & Janda (1996).
The following is an expected outline of the course. You do not need to do any of the readings in advance, and there will be a more detailed bibliography in the lectures themselves, but here are some suggestions that may be helpful if you have time. I’m providing links to online versions, unpaywalled where possible.
| Session | Topic | Suggested reading |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Slavic phonology and generative phonology | Bethin (2006), online here |
| Tuesday | Palatalization and consonant-vowel interactions | Padgett (2011), online here. Extra reading: Gussmann (1992) |
| Wednesday | Mid vowel alternations | Hamilton (1976), online here |
| Thursday | Yer vowels | Scheer (2011), or alternatively Scheer (2006), online here |
| Friday | Synchrony, diachrony and the life cycle | Background reading on the life cycle: Bermúdez-Otero (2015), online here |
Notation
In the materials, I will mostly use the spelling (when the language uses the Latin script) or a version of the Slavistic transliteration from Cyrillic: this will tend to reflect the information we need, and I will give the IPA where it is important but not obvious. I will occasionally use full IPA transcription, but I avoid doing it consistently for pragmatic reasons: for example, in the case of Russian it would require me to show vowel reduction, which most of the time serves to obscure rather than clarify the patterns, especially if you’re not familiar with the language. This solution also has its drawbacks, as you might not be familiar with Slavic at all or with the specific language in question. If you are confused or struggling to follow, please just shout!
Course annotation
The sound patterns of the Slavic languages played a foundational role in the development of Western phonological theory. Both structuralist and generative phonology share a history (or pre-history) of close engagement with Slavic data and extensive traditions of its analysis. Despite these historical links, the approaches and results achieved in these traditions in dealing with essentially the same data can be strikingly different. Much of this divergence can be ascribed to differences in how to approach the close and complex interaction of morphology and phonology that is characteristic of Slavic languages.
In this course, we will critically consider a number of Slavic sound patterns and focus on how they have been treated within the generative/SPE tradition. Despite significant changes in the general approach over time, including the development of nonlinear phonology and a swing towards and away from surface-oriented theories such as OT, the approach to Slavic phonology has remained surprisingly stable, and in some ways unchanged since the pioneering era of the 1950s and 1960s. Much current work still operates with abstract underlying representations and long synchronic derivations that more or less explicitly recapitulate historical developments — an approach that has been problematized or fully abandoned in other empirical domains.
We will ask if it is still true consonant palatalization always derives from following front vowels; if consonant-final words still end in yer vowels; how many vowel phonemes we need, and how to find this out; when to give up on phonology; and how to tie it all together.
We will work on these problems together: the course will be suitable both for students with some knowledge of generative phonology but no knowledge of Slavic and for those without extensive expertise in SPE tradition. Some suggested specific readings will be provided nearer the time.
If you have no knowledge of generative phonology, but are keen to acquire some, I recommend looking through an introductory textbook: one suggestion is Kennedy (2017).1
1 See here for a PDF.