Lebedivna, O. The development of the Common Slavic tendency toward intrasyllabic harmony in the Kryvorivnja dialect of Hutsul. – A qualifying research work presented as a manuscript.
A Dissertation submitted to earn the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the 03 Humanities field of knowledge in the specialty of 035 Philology. – National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Kyiv, 2023.
The dissertation investigates the Common Slavic (CS) tendency towards intrasyllabic harmony in the Kryvorivnja dialect (Kr) of Hutsul, one of the Southwestern dialects of Ukrainian, used primarily in a village of Kryvorivnja located in the Carpathian Mountains. I reinterpret intrasyllabic harmony as related to the distinctive feature of flatness (rounding) of vowels on the surface phonological representation; the underlying distinctive feature in the vowels was sharping in Common Slavic. I treat the intrasyllabic harmony as a phonological constraint which is one of the phonological objects constituing part of a speaker’s grammar.
For Ukrainian, the phonological opposition in palatalization was finally established after the shift of jers causing a shift of a distinctive feature of sharping of consonants and a distinctive feature of flatting of vowels from the underlying representation to the surface in those Southern Ukrainian dialects which served as a foundation for Kr. An analysis of the tendency towards intrasyllabic harmony constraint in CS and Kr with respect to Proto Ukrainian, Old Ukrainian, and Middle Ukrainian shows that Slavic-Altaic contacts could not be the main reason for introducing the innovation in CS. I argue that the CS ablaut of *ē > *eā (ca 7th century BC) occurred as a result of the tendency towards intrasyllabic harmony constraint. Being stress-indipendent, the archaic in character constraint is active in Kr.
The phonological system of the Kryvorivnja dialect, whose acoustic data are collected from 2019 to 2022 and analyzed with the help of the program Praat, are treated primarily from the diachronic point of view. The Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary parish register books composed in 1775–1944, and etnographical records and texts written in Kr from the early 20th–21st century, are analyzed from this perspective. I consider some systemic phonological phenomena caused by the tendency towards intrasyllabic harmony constraint, which are the following: 1) the dialectal umlaut ’а > і; 2) the fourth palatalization of velars; 3) a change of *o before a syllable with a jer subjected to elimination; 4) the preservation of the soft articulation of *r’ in Kr and its overall elimination before -uk- in parish registers starting 1871, putting aside the sporadic use of a form with the r’ reflex in 1923. To substantiate the chronology and regional peculiarities of some language phenomena, I resort to the 14th–15th century Moldavian charters and the 12th century “Harvard” Psalter of Rus’.
In my dissertation, I argue for the first time that the а > i change was not morphologized in Kr, which implies the connection of е, ɪ, і with the phoneme /a/. I suggest for the first time the *o > Kr ɪ, і change before a syllable with a weak jer be an outcome of the fourth palatalization of velars and reflexes of *o represent allophones of the phonemes /o/ and /i/, respectively. The preservation of the palatalized r’ in Kr is explained for the first time by the processes still active in the dialect, and the earlier shift of [ʉ] > [i] after a velar depended on the wrong decision of a speaker as to the palatalization of labials that share with velars to the back tract of articulation with respect to the tongue position.
Keywords: history of Ukrainian, phonetics, Hutsul dialect, intrasyllabic harmony, palatalization, dialectal umlaut, morphologization, noun, ending, written records of Old and Middle Ukrainian, parish register books, proper names, linguistic norm.
