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48 The phonological nature of the beginning of the wordtions. The remnant of this process in modern Slavic languages is thevowel-zero alternation occurring at the sites of the historic jers. 2 It haslong been noticed that verbal stems containing a jer make the prefixaljer vocalise. This is especially visible in the morphological class of DerivedImperfectives (DI). In other words, verbs starting with consonantclusters which may be broken up by a vowel in Derived Imperfectiveforce the prefixal vowel to appear phonetically, predominantly as [e].Recall the example from the previous section, i.e. [pr]aæ, ‘wash’. Addingthe prefix od- ‘from’ to the verb stem brings about the vocalisation of theprefix final vowel, that is, [ode+pr]aæ. This confirms the representationfrom the previous section where the initial cluster in [pr]aæ is separatedby an alternating vowel, i.e. [p ® eZ]e. To summarise briefly, from the behaviourof the prefix-final vowel we can deduce whether the stem initialconsonant cluster is separated by a properly governed nucleus or not.Usually we have an additional confirmation in the form of the vowelzeroalternation in the stem itself, just like in the [pr]aæ case. Thus, theverb should be represented as /pPrat¡‚/. 3 When the prefix od- /odP-/ ‘from’is attached to this stem a sequence of two jers arises /odPpPrat¡‚/ whichmeans that the second jer, being itself properly governed, cannot performthe same action and govern the prefix final jer, and this producesthe phonetic form [odeprat¡‚].(5) 4 a. PG PGb. PGC V|oC|dV|e+ C|pVeC|rV|aC|t¡‚V|PC V|oC|dVe+ C V C V|p ® | | |e Z eWhat is interesting, however, is the existence of clusters which are notbroken up by a vowel in DI and which do not force the prefix vowel tovocalise. The data in (6) is taken from Cyran (2003: 169) with someminor modifications.2Synchronically the term is used to refer to such alternating vowels.3Recall from the previous section that alternating vowels are lexically present.This means that the stem /pPrat¡‚/ should be actually represented as /perat¡‚/. The initialvowel is realised phonetically if it escapes Proper Government. In this work we will usethe symbol ‘P’ to indicate both empty positions and lexically present alternating vowels.The difference will be stressed only when it is crucial to the discussion.4The initial empty CV site before the stem in (5) is not represented as it is notgermane to the discussion.