New insights on Lithuanian accentuation from the unpublished manuscripts of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913)

Abstract

At his death, the great linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) left a considerable amount of papers, drafts and documents, some of them dealing with the Lithuanian language. Only in 1996 were they given to the public library of Geneva. The aim of this paper is to present some of the new insights offered by these unpublished documents in the field of Lithuanian accentuation. The majority of the documents pertaining to Lithuanian accentuation were written by Saussure over a time span of almost ten years between 1888 and 1896 in Paris and Geneva; some of them are later notes from a course on the Lithuanian language given by Saussure in 1901–1902 in Geneva. These manuscripts shed some light on a research field that still remains a relatively neglected part of Saussure’s scientific production. They bring new insights on crucial issues such as the origins of the Lithuanian intonations or the Baltic metatony. 

An Overview of Lithuanian Intonation: A Linguistic and Modelling Perspective

“…In the wake of historical linguistics in the 19th century, Lithuanian reached the peak of its linguistic glory, becoming the reference language for F. de Saussure, who based his Saussure's Law on Lithuanian pitch accent that he considered as the missing link of Indo-European linguistic history (Joseph, 2009;de Saussure, 1879de Saussure, , 1894de Saussure, , 1896. Ever since, Lithuanian has been perceived as the most "archaic of modern Indo-European languages", attracting the attention of many imminent historical and structuralist linguists, such as Antoine Meillet and Nikolai Trubetzkoy (Michelini, 2000;Petit, 2020). Later on, prominent generative phonologists, such as Morris Halle and Juliette Blevins also worked with its accentuation system (Blevins, 1993;Halle and Vergnaud, 1987).…”