Stress Retraction in the Manuscript Sources of the Eastern Aukštaitian Subdialect of Utena from the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

The article examines manuscript sources of the Eastern Aukštaitian subdialect of Utena from the 1950s and 1960s, stored in the Dialect Archive of the Centre of Geolinguistics at the Institute of the Lithuanian Language, from the perspective of accentuation. The study aims to identify the stress retraction phenomena that were in effect in the Utena subdialect in the mid-20^th century and to discuss the nature and distribution of this phenomenon within the subdialect area. The analysis reveals an uneven and rather late formation of stress retraction as a rule in the Utena subdialect. Drawing on 19th-century texts (from the 1860s to the 1880s) covering the subdialects of Kupiškis, Anykščiai, and Utena (which belong to the eastern part of the Eastern Aukštaitian dialect), published by the German linguist Franz Specht in Litauische Mundarten gesammelt von A. Baranowski in Leipzig, as well as 20th-century descriptions of subdialects (from the 1950s and 1960s), the article provides new insights into the nature of stress retraction in the Utena subdialect. It is assumed that between the 1950s and mid-1960s, a more intensive rather than weak conditional stress retraction rule was forming in the northern part and western periphery of the Utena subdialect, an area previously assigned to the weak conditional stress retraction by the compilers of the Atlas of the Lithuanian Language (1982).