From Indo-European Languages

A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, Second Edition
Preface · What's New · Conventions
The Indo-European language family
Traditional views · The Theory of the Three Stages · Urheimat · Other theories · Relationship to other languages · Schleicher's fable · Northern (Europe's IE) and Southern} (Greek, Armenian, Aryan) dialects · Anatolian languages · Modern Indo-European
Letters and Sounds
Classification of sounds · Sounds of the letters · Syllables · Quantity · Accent · Vowel change · Consonant change · Peculiarities of orthography · Kindred forms
Words and Their Forms
Inflection · Root, stem and base · Gender · General rules of gender ·Vowel grade · Word formation · Compound words · Names of persons
Nouns
a-Declension · o-Declension · Nouns in i, u and diphthong · Nouns in consonant · Heteroclites · Vocalism before the declension · Vocalism in the plural · Accent in declension
Adjectives
Inflection of adjectives · The motion · Adjective specialization ·Comparison of adjectives · Numerals
Pronouns
Personal · Reflexive · Possessive · Anaphoric · Demonstrative · Interrogative and indefinite · Relative · Other
Verbs
Forms of the verb · The conjugations · The four stems · Mood stems · The voice · Noun and adjective forms · Conjugated examples · The verbal accent
Particles
Adverbs · Derivation of adverbs · Prepositions · Conjunctions
Syntax
The sentence · Morphosyntax · Sentence modifiers · Verbal modifiers · Nominal modifiers · Modified forms of PIE simple sentences · Syntactic categories

2.6.1. There are stressed as well as unstressed words. The last could indicate words that are always enclitic, i.e., they are always bound to the accent of the preceding word, as -qe, and, -ṛ, for; while another can be proclitics, like prepositions.

2.6.2. The oldest PIE was a stress language in which syllable strength was chiefly a matter of pitch differences and, presumably, of intensity (loudness).

NOTE. Following Gąsiorowski, “[i]n this respect it was similar to Spanish or Polish, but not to English with its emphatic ‘expiratory’ stress (…) It thus stood close to the borderline between stress systems and pitch accent systems. Indeed, some linguists have attributed pitch accent contrasts to PIE on the strength of accentual correspondences between Balto-Slavic and Greek. However, scholars such as Jerzy Kuryłowicz and – more recently – Paul Kiparsky have convincingly argued that such contrasts arose independently in the branches in question. The best evidence for the original location of stress in PIE comes from Vedic (Classical Sanskrit developed its own stress system, similar to that of Latin). The location of pitch accent in Classical Greek (especially in Greek noun paradigms) also reflects the PIE stress pattern. There are, to be sure, some specifically Greek constraints on the distribution of pitch accents, but in the environments where such restrictions do not apply, Greek usually agrees with Vedic. In the Germanic languages the original location of stress is sometimes reconstructible thanks to the phonetic ‘fingerprints’ of Verner’s Law. Germanic spectacularly bears out the testimony of Vedic and Classical Greek. Finally, the evolution of pitch-accent systems in Balto-Slavic makes most sense if we adopt the stress system reconstructed on the basis of Vedic, Greek and Germanic as its starting-point”.

2.6.4. The Stress is free, but that does not mean anarchy. On the contrary, it means that each non-clitic word has an accent and only one accent, and one has to know – usually by way of practice – where it goes. Its location depended on the inflectional type to which a given word belonged.

NOTE. Indo-European stress is (at least partly) unpredictable. Rather, it is lexical: it comes as part of the word and must be memorized, although orthography can make stress unambiguous for a reader, and some stress patterns are ruled out. Otherwise homophonous words may differ only by the position of the stress, and it is thus possible to use stress as a grammatical device.

2.6.5. Adjectives are often stressed on the ending, especially if they are derivatives; as, ghḷtnós, golden, from ghḷtom, gold, ṇgnōtós, unknown, from gnōskō, know. Nevertheless, nouns and adjective might be stressed on any syllable.

NOTE. There are some accent rules to be followed in the declension of nouns and in the conjugation of verbs, which will be later studied.

References

• Quiles, Carlos, López-Menchero, Fernando, A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, Second Edition, Indo-European Language Association, 2009, ISBN 9781448682065