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The development of the prosodic system from Indo-European to Balto-Slavic is dominated by two major innovations: the rise of mobility and the rise of acuteness. This book provides a new account of the latter. It stands out from previous works for being informed by recent advances in phonological typology and tonogenesis and, especially, for its comprehensiveness. All matters related to the rise of acuteness are treated in detail. As a result, the book includes new insights on several issues of Balto-Slavic historical phonology and morphology as well.

The Prehistory of the Balto-Slavic Accent has been written to fill a gap. The interested non-specialist can easily learn about the complex accent systems of the individual Baltic and Slavic languages and how they relate to each other. But the reader interested in the Proto-Balto-Slavic parent system, and how it evolved from the very different system of Proto-Indo-European, has few reliable places to turn. The goal of this book is to provide an accentological interface between Indo-European and Balto-Slavic—to identify and explain the accent shifts and other early changes that give the earliest stages of Baltic and Slavic their distinctive prosodic cast.