Authors

Discussion

In this paper, I discuss the -t’ > -t change in 3rd person present and future singular and plural verbs in Southwest Ukrainian (SWU) as opposed to Standard Ukrainian (StU). The account consists of a plausible explication of the dispalatalization of -t’ after the jer shift, from -tь in Old Ukrainian, e.g., southern redactions of the Ukrainian recension of Church Slavonic, that is, mid-12th c “Harvard” Psalter (see Altbauer & Lunt 1978, ix) and the (late 12th–)early 13th c Viennese Octoechos (see Hnatenko 2021; Mojsijenko 2021), through -tъ in Middle Ukrainian, e.g., the Moldavian charters of the late 14th – 15th c conducted in Moldavian principality, to -t in the modern Kryvorivnja (Kr) (Hutsul) dialect of SWU, cf. Kr [ɪˈd^ja]t ‘go’ 3sg.pres, [ˈb^jet^jimut] ‘beat’ 3pl.fut. 

I submit that the dispalatalization of a word-final t’ in Southwest Ukrainian was motivated by the Common Slavic (CS) tendency towards intrasyllabic harmony (TTIH) as first introduced for CS by Roman Jakobson (1962; cf. Shevelov 1964; Bethin 1998). I conceive that the CS TTIH is a constraint with respect to the distinctive tonality feature of flatness (Lebedivna 2023; cf. Timberlake 1978, 726; Honeybone 2019a, 2019b). In SWU, the treatment of -t’ as -t must have developed after the jer shift by the mid-12th c when the following non-flat jer in a weak position was eliminated. In this vein, verbal endings in -t’ possessed no opposition in palatalization and potential alternation -t’ : -t’- to preserve the palatal articulation.