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This paper presents a systematic reassessment of Sturtevant’s Law (Sturtevant 1932), which governs the differing outcomes of Proto-Indo-European voiced and voiceless obstruents in Hittite (Anatolian). I argue that Sturtevant’s Law was a conditioned pre-Hittite sound change whereby (i) contrastively voiceless word-medial obstruents regularly underwent gemination (cf. Melchert 1994), but gemination was blocked for stops in pre-stop position; and (ii) the inherited [±voice] contrast was then lost, replaced by the [±long] opposition observed in Hittite (cf. Blevins 2004). I provide empirical and typological support for this novel restriction, which is shown not only to account straightforwardly for data that is problematic under previous analyses, but also to be phonetically motivated, a natural consequence of the poorly cued durational contrast between voiceless and voiced stops in pre-stop environments. I develop an optimality-theoretic analysis of this gemination pattern in pre-Hittite, and discuss how this grammar gave rise to synchronic Hittite via “transphonologization” (Hyman 1976, 2013). Finally, it is argued that this analysis supports deriving the Hittite stop system from the Proto-Indo-European system as traditionally reconstructed with an opposition between voiceless, voiced, and breathy voiced stops (contra Kloekhorst 2016, Jäntti 2017).

This paper develops a new optimality theoretic analysis of lexical accent in Hittite (Anatolian, Indo-European). I demonstrate that Hittite synchronic stress assignment is consistent with Kiparsky and Halle's (1977) Basic Accentuation Principle, which assigns primary stress to the leftmost morpheme lexically specified for prosodic prominence or else to the left edge of a prosodic word. The Hittite evidence is thus shown to converge with Kiparsky and Halle's reconstruction of this principle for the common ancestor of the non-Anatolian Indo-European languages (i.e. Proto-Nuclear-Indo-European), and in view of this agreement, argued to be reconstructible for Proto-Indo-European itself.

This paper adduces evidence for and attempts to phonologically motivate a pattern of descriptive “retraction” of surface word accent in the Anatolian languages. It is proposed that the innovative accentual peak ( ictus ) in the relevant forms is due to Anatolian Default Accentuation , which applies when no constituent morpheme in a prosodic word is lexically specified as accented and assigns ictus to its leftmost syllable. Diachronic prosodic change is shown to result from the interaction of various morphophonological developments and the stable operation of this default accentual principle, whose effects in Hittite, Palaic, and Luwian require its reconstruction for Proto-Anatolian. Furthermore, the Anatolian evidence is argued to support Kiparsky and Halle’s (1977) reconstruction of the same default principle for Proto-Indo-European on the basis of Vedic Sanskrit and Balto-Slavic evidence.

In this paper we develop a synchronic and diachronic analysis of the phonology of partial reduplication in the Anatolian branch of Indo-European. We argue that the reduplicative patterns of Hittite and Luwian differ from Proto-Anatolian, which exhibited an asymmetric treatment of verbal stems with initial consonant clusters: full copying of sibilant-stop clusters, but partial copying of stop-sonorant clusters. We contend that the phonological constraint driving this asymmetry, No Poorly-Cued Repetitions (Zukoff 2017a), was demoted within the separate prehistories of Hittite and Luwian due to independent phonological changes eliminating the distinction between these cluster types. Furthermore, we show that the proposed set of diachronic constraint rerankings in Hittite and Luwian can be explained under Maximally Informative Recursive Constraint Demotion, a minor reformulation of the Recursive Constraint Demotion algorithm (RCD;Tesar 1995, Tesar and Smolensky 1998 that favors the high ranking of maximally informative winner-preferring constraints. KeywordsHittite -Indo-European -phonological learning -diachronic phonology -language change Downloaded from Brill.com07/08/2020 12:24:39PM via free access yates and zukoff Indo-European Linguistics 6 (2018) 201-270