Das altpreußische Akzentsystem ; The Old Prussian accentual system ; Prūsų kalbos kirčiavimo sistema

The dissertation contains a description of the accentual system of Old Prussian as evidenced by the orthography of Prussian written monuments, particularly that of the Third Catechism (which abounds the most in accentological data). An attempt is made to reconstruct, as comprehensively as possible, the synchronic state of the accentual system in question, as well as to identify any possible trends in its diachronic development. At the first stage of research, upon a critical examination of all the theories dealing with Old Prussian accentology and accentography published to date, the methods of identifying the stressed syllable based on the orthography of the written monuments are outlined. The validity of Saussure-Fortunatov’s and Kortlandt’s laws, which have been postulated in the scholarly literature on Old Prussian, is subjected to a re-evaluation. Then, an analysis of the accentual system is undertaken, in adherence to the principles of morphological accentology, in order to determine the accentual properties of the Old Prussian morphemes conditioning the stress of the attested words, as well as to classify the words by accentual paradigm and to elucidate the role of stress in word-formation. This reconstructed synchronic system is then thoroughly confronted with those of the related languages (primarily Lithuanian and Slavic) to demonstrate the correspondences and to account for the discrepancies between them.