HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

534 DAVID J. BIRNBAUMthey describe and, further, whether the next generation of Ukrainian linguists will betrained not to realize why piBHHfi, with its hard v, is not evidence for the hardeningof labials in Ukrainian.In their discussion of syllabification in the East Slavic languages, the authorsstate that in early East Slavic, vowels were the syllabic sounds that were independentlycapable of forming syllables and that "the liquids r and I which occurredafter a vowel and before a consonant (BT>JIKT>) were also characterized by this quality"(p. 92). This formulation reflects a confusion of writing system and pronunciation;according to it, BT>JIKT>, the example presented, would be trisyllabic: BT>-JI-KT>.To help explain the second pleophony, one might argue that Rusian knew a pronunciation*vlki> and spelled the syllabic liquid asiji, but this is very different from theauthors' claim that a liquid following a vowel and preceding a consonant was syllabic.The section devoted to stress (pp. 94-97) is one of the weakest in PH. Wordsare classified not according to the accentual properties of morphemes, but accordingto whether stress falls on the first, last, penultimate, or other syllable. This review isnot the place to describe the useful analyses of stress that can be achieved from amorphological perspective, 3 but such an approach would enable all root morphemesto be assigned to one of three accentual classes and would allow for a neat andcoherent characterization of possible accentual alternations. Replacing the spacedevoted to long lists of random examples (pp. 96-97) with a more systematicaccount of stress in the two languages would have improved this part of PH. Afterall, English words are also stressed on the first, last, penultimate, or other syllable,but the stress systems of Russian and Ukrainian are generically much closer to eachother than either is to English, a fact that can be illuminated far better by a descriptionof the basically morphological nature of East Slavic stress than by the merecomparison of individual words. Furthermore, the authors never discuss disyllabicwords, where the penultimate and the first syllable are the same; in some such wordsstress is best considered penultimate, while in others it is best considered initial.The morphology section is subdivided into general observations, the noun (followedby noun formation, gender, declension patterns, number, case), the pronoun(with various subdivisions), the adjective (including adjective formation, shortforms, long forms, degrees of comparison), the numeral (including formation anddeclension), the verb (including verb formation, conjugation types, present tense,future tense, past tense, imperative, conditional, infinitive, participle, gerund), theadverb, the preposition, particles, and interjections.The authors address the different parts of speech in separate subsections, inwhich they discuss the grammatical categories implemented. The exposition isclear, although some examples are badly chosen: one wonders why fleHb-Hin,3HMa-niT0 are cited as pairs in the discussion of gender immediately afterHifl-6a6Ka and other male-female pairs of living creatures (p. 102). Since the3See, for example, N. A. Fedjanina, Udarenie v sovremennom russkom jazyke (Moscow,1982).