REGULAR PROPERTIES OF OLD CHURCH SLAVONIC VERBS

Students approaching the Old Church Slavonic system of conjugation with the aid of the lakobsonian one-stem verb system face a serious obstacle which is not present in Russian. A number of important Old Church Slavonic verbs present an alternation of the jer root-vowel. Since there are least four vowels which alternate with root jers, and since the morphological domain of the alternation varies with the stem-class, the student who wishes to master the conjugation system appears to be faced with a formidable task of memorization. Some of the attempts to regularize the Old Church Slavonic conjugation on the lakobsonian one-stem model have not been of much help to the student in the area of root alternations. Halle (1951: 162) simply listed such verbs as 'irregularities,' stating that "the following verbs undergo vowel changes in their major stems for which we were unable to find simple rules." Lunt applied the lakobsonian verbal system but since, as he (1959:80) stated, "the treatment in this book is based on Halle's work," the original irregularities remained as a long list at the end of Lunt's description. A significant attempt to integrate these irregular verbs into a system can be found in the 'Epilogue' which Lunt appended to his grammar in its 1974 edition. These verbs are however still considered irregular, and the format of the epilogue is not the most convenient way to arrange the verbal root alternations as such. Lunt attempts to "re-examine the data of Old Church Slavonic ... without ... the need to decide whether surface alternations are automatic or morpho­ logically conditioned," (1974:147). This paper is an attempt to present the regular pattern found among many verbs which are usually considered irregular in Old Church Slavonic. Our system will not remove all irregularities, but it will deal with a significant number of the most troublesome root-vowel alternations. Let us state some of our basic assumptions. We agree with Lunt in rejecting the American descriptivist distinction between automatic phonemic and automatic morpho­ phonemic rules, both of which can be stated in terms of purely phonological environ­ ments. J On the other hand we assume an important distinction between automatic (i.e., phonologically conditioned) rules and the non-automatic, morphophonemic type. This view comes quite close to the distinction of 'positional' and 'non-positional' alternations, as espoused by members of the Moscow Phonological School (Panov 1979:95-102). We shall regularize virtually all Old Church Slavonic verbs which contain a jer-vowel in their lakobsonian basic-stem by predicting that there is a regular mutation of all root front-jer vowels in the following instances: I. when vocalic endings are added to first conjugation a-suffix verbs;2 2. when obstruent endings are added to non-suffixed verbs, regardless of whether the verbal stem ends in an obstruent or a sonoran!. Since we are concentrating on roots which contain a jer-vowel, and since liquids frequently occur followingjers and preceding vowels (e.g., birati, mirQ) we must first state our assumptions regarding the phonological shape of the JER + LIQUID group when both vowels and consonants may follow the liquid. Our phonological rules will be seen to specify metathesis in order to get us from the phonological basic form to the surface. Although this may violate certain theoretical notions of linearity, we maintain it on the basis of its purely phonological environment for operation in Old Church Slavonic. Distributionally, JER + LIQUID groups can occur in prevocalic position (e.g., mirQ,