Prehistoric Slavic Contraction

By Jiří Marvan

This book outlines the origin and process of contraction as it took place in the proto-dialects of the future Czech, Serbian, Polish, Slovak, Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian languages in about the ninth to eleventh centuries. The author's conception differs from the traditional attitude to the available data mainly in the assumption that the discriminative treatment of contraction by different proto-dialects is not a handicap but rather an efficient and safe means of reconstructing territorial, chronological and structural stratification. This factor also replaces a "flat," one-level description of contraction with a process consisting of several consecutive stages. Although many gaps remain to be filled in the study of prehistoric Slavic contraction, the author hopes that his work will open the way to further inquiry into the subject by dialectologists and historians of language.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B00350CMZI
• ISBN13: 9780271002101
• Release Date: June 1991
• Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
• Length: 196 Pages
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"