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This project is a pilot study for a post-doctoral research, which aims at clarifying the development of the Baltic preterit system. The Baltic branch, together with the Slavic branch, forms the Balto-Slavic family, which is one of the Indo-European language family. While some other Indo-European languages inherited a couple of preteirt categories, the Baltic languages inherited only one simple preterit category that have two stem formations:

1. ā-preterit: 3sg./pl. Lith. pir̃ko, Latv. pirka '(he/she/they) bought' < Proto-Baltic (PB) *pirk-ā
2. ē-preterit: 3sg./pl. Lith. mìrė, OLatv. mire '(he/she/they) died' < PB *mir-ē

Out of these two formations, the ē-preterit involves historical problems in particular. Its historical origin remains disputed, and it includes historically enigmatic categories. This project will handle one of such categories called “long-vowel preterit,” which is characterized with a long vowel in the root, e.g, 3sg./pl. pret. bė̃rė to inf. ber̃ti 'to scatter', 3sg./pl. pres. bẽria. Furthermore, some of them show tone variations like ber̃ti, 3sg./pl. pres. bẽria, 3sg./pl. pret. bė̃rė / bérti, bẽria, bė́rė, while others do not, e.g., gérti, gẽria, gė́rė 'drink.' There are at least two hypotheses on the origin of the Baltic long-vowel preterit. One hypothesis assumes that the long-vowel preterits are descendants of the imperfect formed to Narten presents, while the other hypothesizes that the long vowel with the circumflex tone was introduced through Stang-Larsson's rule, according to which a vowel (V) was lengthened and received a circumflex tone in a sequence *V-íyā- (> *V̅̃-ē-). This project will examine the data with/without the tone variations in light of the environment for the Stang-Larsson's rule, and will clarify how heterogeneous groups of verbs developed to form such distribution.

• April 5th 2018
  "Sievers-Edgerton’s Law, Stang-Larsson’s rule, and Narten Imperfects in Baltic" 4th Indo-European Research Colloquium, University of Zürich.

• "Sievers-Edgertons Variants, Stang-Larssons Rule, and Narten Imperfects in Baltic Long-Vowel Preterits". Baltistica 54(1), 2019, pp. 35-46.