THE AREAL DISTRIBUTION OF NOUNS IN -(jer)JE IN SOUTH SLAVIC MICRODIALECTS (WITH SPECIAL CONSIDERATION OF THE WORD-FINAL VOWEL LENGTHENING) (Arealna distribucija substantivov na -(jer)je v juzhnoslovanskih govorih (s posebnim ozirom na podaljshavo izg

In western South Slavic (southern and eastern Slovenian, Croatian) sub- and microdialects an accent type which originated through lexical and accentual derivation of nouns ending in the suffix -(jer)je is exhibited by a characteristic paradigm with a long word-final vowel: N sg. -je, G sg. -jâ, etc. The corpus of such nouns , collected from dictionaries and scholarly literature, is manifestly dialectal and clearly dwindling in favor of the paradigms with short-stressed ending or with leftward accent shift and new acute tone, or with the general Stokavian retraction of accent alone. The South Slavic microdialects in question display a more or less evident tendency to morphologize the desinental stress even in the nouns that used to belong to the accentual paradigms A, D and E (e.g. Cro. Cak./Novi kamení, Sln./Prekmurje obiljé). Considering that the word-final vowel length in the South Slavic microdialects cannot be satisfactorily explained by intrinsic South Slavic rules of lengthening, it seems plausible that this phonetic-accentual type is an archaism whose origin dates back to the period when the schwas were weakening. If so, then this type can be connected with its systemic congeners in West Slavic (Czech, Slovak, Polish, Pomeranian). In the West Slavic languages, this paradigmatic type has been treated within the framework of late Proto-Slavic metatony and contraction; in the South Slavic languages, however, primarily within the framework of metatony, owing to the obvious preservation of j. As both of these phenomena are essentially tied to the weakening of the Proto-Slavic schwas, it seems in a purely theoretical scenario quite possible that owing to the different directions in the development of the softness correlation and prosodic devices, the inclusion of the examined nouns into the particular late Proto-Slavic phonological systems depended also the formal differences between the concrete