Getting Proto-Germanic stress: phonetics and historic accentology

In this guest talk given at the University of Stockholm in October 2008, I challenge the mainstream interpretations of Verner's law and Holzmann's law and argue that free stress existed after the breakup of the Germanic protolanguage.  I adopt Dybo's (1961a, 1962b, 2002, 2008) diachronic analysis according to which Germanic words with Holzmann's law correspond to Baltic-Slavic oxytona and combine it with the revision of Verner's law (1877) in Zimmerling (2007), where I argue in detail that the voicing of the intervocalic consonants (PIE stops || PG fricatives) directly reflects the remnants of the free stress in Early Germanic languages but not the effects of its loss as was wrongly assumed by Verner himself and his followers. The problem is that correct diachronic correspondenses between PIE and PG consonants do not reconstruct any reliable-looking phonetic process that could be instrumental in Modern and Ancient languages. However, if one considers the external accentological parallels to Germanic verbs with Holzmann's law, the analysis is most straightforward. The variation of voiceless vs voiced fricatives (Verner's law) and standard vs reinforced glides j ~ JJ > gjj (djj) on the same segmental basis is explained uniformly by the placement of the word accent. The main position of the accentological mutation was the onset of the non-initial stressed syllable in words from the Baltic-Slavic mobile paradigm: voiceless fricatives got voiced, glides -j-, -w- got lengthened. Long-vocalic roots with post-root stress could undergo vowel shortening. A plausible phonetic interpretation of this distribution is that the words displaying the Verner or Holzmann effects had early timing, i. e. anticipating tonal movement starting before the stressed vowel. Where neither phonologically relevant pairs of phonemes nor glides were present, early timing did not trigger any changes in the segmental inventory. Lexical divergencies between different Old Germanic languages regarding Verner's law (Wood 1895) show that different Germanic languages generalized either the variants with early timing (>> Verner's effects) or with standard timing (no Verner's effects). Finally, obsolete cases of Verner's law in the forms of one of the same word, cf. Gothic sais-lep ~ saiz-lep can reflect not the retraction of stress to the initial syllable but coexisting variants with normal and early timing.