Until the very early Middle Ages, Slavic vocalism developed uniformly. Later it began to diversify. Causes of diversification included territorial dispersion and occupation of areas where non-Slavic tribes lived or where Slavs neighboured non-Slavs. Some areas retained archaic features; others began to develop innovations. Hence, smaller intersecting areas often arose with particular features. In addition to the five mandatory vowel segments, Slavic languages have additional regional segments. We distinguish at least the following: an area with phonological long vowels; the western periphery with diphthongs and additional intermediate segments between /i/ and /e/ and between /u/ and /o/; an area with additional central vowels; one with distinctive tonal features; one with reduction of unstressed vowels; areas with traces of nasal vowels; an area with a glottal stop; one with high frequency of vowel clusters (while the frequency ratio of vowels to consonants in text does not vary much).

This chapter provides an overview of phonologically conditioned synchronic alternations representative of Slavic languages. The vocalic processes covered are vowel reduction and resulting phonological neutralization patterns in unstressed syllables, vowel-zero alternations, alternations in vowel quantity due to compensatory lengthening or to rhythmic requirements, and alternations in vowel quality, such as fronting/backing and raising/lowering. The consonantal processes discussed include alternations in voicing, such as voicing assimilation and word-final devoicing, and palatalization before front vowels and as a result of assimilation in a consonant cluster. Some language-specific alternations are also discussed.

This chapter examines consonants in Slavic languages primarily from a synchronic perspective. I begin by reviewing the consonant inventories. Key properties of the inventories are secondary palatalization, a large inventory of coronal fricatives and affricates, and a voicing contrast in obstruents. The remainder of the chapter reviews four types of consonant patterns: palatalization, voicing, other local alternations, and long-distance alternations. Palatalization is inherited from Proto-Slavic, but the contemporary languages differ in terms of segments undergoing it, morphological triggers, and phonological conditioning. Slavic voicing alternations offer typological insight into the extent of cross-linguistic variation. The key differences are in final devoicing, directionality, and participation of sonorants. Slavic languages also exhibit limited place assimilation, dissimilation, and consonant decomposition. As for long-distance patterns, I review both assimilatory (sibilant consonant harmony) and dissimilatory (consonant co-occurrence restrictions) phenomena in two Slavic languages.

The seemingly idiosyncratic behavior of numerals in Russian and other Slavic languages has long puzzled linguists. This entry describes the core phenomena, taking Russian as a point of departure. Significant differences in other Slavic languages are also identified, since a central problem of analysis is how variation across Slavic might be accommodated. The core data issues concern case and agreement, the former with respect to the phrase containing the numeral, the latter both internal to the numeral phrase as well as between it and the predicate. Related phenomena exhibited by other quantity expressions are also presented. In the course of the presentation, several conceptual approaches are briefly identified, and the reader is directed to relevant research.

The introduction to this volume describes its content. It also provides the rationale for including selected topics and provides comments on the manner of presentation adopted in this volume.

Slavic languages are notorious for rich inflectional systems, allowing substantial freedom in word order. Aside from SVO word order, canonical for the great majority of Slavic languages, orders with arguments surfacing in non-canonical positions are also allowed. We consider two such orders – OVS and OSV. The two orders stem from two different types of argument reordering with distinct syntactic, interpretive and prosodic properties. The first is linked to neutral prosody and is licenced by the object being construed as interpretively prominent compared to the subject. The object undergoing this type of reordering binds into the subject and takes scope over it. This reordering is possible only if the thematic prominence relations of arguments are identified by means other than their relative structural position. The second type is linked to marked prosody and is licenced by the displaced object being disambiguated as contrastive. In this type of reordering the object cannot bind into the subject or take scope over it. This type of reordering is possible only if the object carries a strong prosodic marker.

This chapter provides an overview of Slavic syllable structure from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. It begins by introducing some general phonological background on the syllable and reviewing key concepts, such as syllabification and sonority. The discussion further focuses on specific aspects of Slavic syllable structure: inventories of syllable-initial and syllable-final consonants and consonant clusters, and the composition of syllable peaks (vowels and syllabic consonants). This is done by situating patterns characteristic of Slavic in the context of cross-linguistic typology of syllable structure, as well as by highlighting common historical sources and more recently developed differences among individual Slavic languages. The chapter concludes with a short review of recent experimental and corpus work on Slavic syllable structure.

Most Slavic orthographies are relatively shallow, relying on phonemic and morphological principles; other orthographic principles play minor roles. However, some orthographies with a rather unbroken tradition give the historical principle a certain role (like Polish or Czech); others rely heavily on the morphological principle (like Russian or to some extent Bulgarian). In some minor details (like comma rules or quotation marks) one can see different external influences, especially French and German. In the ways writing systems were adapted, the major split is between languages written in Cyrillic and those written in Latin. In the Latin alphabet, the main devices used are diacritics (nowadays especially those introduced by the Hussites) and digraphs, whereas Cyrillic hardly has diacritics or digraphs at all but uses special letters created from ligatures or with diacritic elements or borrowed from a different script. Spelling reforms over the course of history have generally strengthened the phonemic principle, unified orthography for a language, or increased or decreased differences vis-à-vis other languages in line with the political situation.

This chapter discusses null-subject clauses, those that do not have the subject in the nominative case. Viewing Slavic languages in their totality, there is a range of null subjects from grammatically obligatory to optional (the presence of the subject signifies emphasis or juxtaposition) to pragmatically motivated. If we view the pro-drop feature as a continuum, as suggested by Pešková, from pro-drop in West Slavic and South Slavic to partially pro-drop in East Slavic (more so in Ukrainian, less so in Russian), then we could correlate a construction of the type (i) Uk. Hru-ACC zakinčeno-ppl ‘Game over (finished)’ with the pro-drop languages, and a construction of the type (d) Rus.-Uk. Udarilo-pastNEU gromom-INSTR ‘Hit by lightning (thunder)’ with partially pro-drop languages. In addition, Russian has a propensity to form infinitive constructions that are absent in other languages.

The present chapter discusses agreement in Slavic languages. Slavic languages are interesting because of their canonical subject-verb agreement, which offers a direct insight into this core syntactic relation (syntactic agreement). Additionally, Slavic languages feature well-documented agreement alternations, which suggest involvement of other language components in agreement (semantic and discourse agreement). Finally, strictly local agreement, often devoid of alternations, operating inside the nominal phrase commands theoretical interest.

This chapter discusses Slavic literary micro-languages, language forms typically used by Slavic minority groups with (to some extent) established traditions of literacy. In the past, these languages were often dealt with under dialectology, with a special note that a given dialect has a written form. The status of those minority languages is often disputed, in the sense that there are discussions – often politically oriented – on whether to give them the status of languages of their own, or of dialects of a language X, or some status between the two (with or without a written form). This chapter presents geographical distribution, status, and other characteristics of these languages and goes on to generalize their status and features into broader, theoretically relevant patterns.

Past review articles on the state-of-the-art of Slavic psycholinguistics and language acquisition in monolingual and heritage bilingual Slavic speakers serve as the starting point for this chapter. We discuss the present state of the field regarding methodological advances and current topics (gender, case, pronominal objects, aspect, and relative clauses), then briefly identify emerging trends in psycholinguistic infrastructure, such as conducting experiments remotely and sharing resources in open access repositories. Our survey highlights the increased popularity of investigations of language processing in real-time and large-scale cross-linguistic studies. We conclude that the field of Slavic psycholinguistics and language acquisition is gaining new and exciting momentum.

This chapter shows that the Slavic scripts roughly align with the cultural division between Slavia Orthodoxa and Slavia Latina. Although the Cyrillo-Methodian tradition of the Glagolitic script connected to the Old Church Slavonic language was originally not confined to either of the two areas and the Glagolitic script was used longest in Catholic Croatia, it is nowadays continued in the form of the Cyrillic script, whereas the Latin alphabet in Slavia Latina is based on a completely different, ‘Western’ tradition. However, mutual influences abound and can be seen in script changes and various instances of biscriptality as well as in the introduction of roman type in the West in the sixteenth century, the adoption of its design principles in the ‘civil type’ in the East in the eighteenth century, and the gradual replacement of both blackletter and Old Cyrillic, which was (almost) completed only in the twentieth century.

This chapter presents the patterns of composition in Slavic languages. In Slavic, most compounds are nouns (like čel-o-věkъ) and adjectives (like *bos-o-nògъ). Verbal compounds (like blag-o-sloviti ‘to bless’) are less frequent and less productive (as is generally the case in Indo-European languages). The author reviews patterns and phenomena of nominal, adjectival, adverbial, verbal, pronominal, and numeral composition.

This chapter gives an overview of phenomena connected to polarity, especially negation, in Slavic languages. The formation of negation in Slavic is rather uniform across languages and historically relatively stable. Further, the chapter discusses the distribution of linguistic expressions connected to different environments involving polarity. The latter includes negative concord and polarity items with a major focus on different series of indefinites. These environments for indefinites are discussed: (i) specific (known to the speaker), (ii) specific (unknown to the speaker), (iii) non-specific (irrealis), (iv) polar question, (v) conditional protasis, (vi) indirect negations, (vii) direct negation, (viii) standard of comparison, and (ix) free choice. Additional negative polarity items are presented, such as scalar particles. Lastly, the chapter treats case alternations in the scope of sentential negation (genitive of negation), which is a feature inherited from Common Slavic, but not present in all modern Slavic languages. The genitive of negation exhibits differing properties in those languages which preserved it.

This chapter addresses verbal aspect in Slavic languages. It first defines main concepts, such as perfective and imperfective verbs. Next, it outlines the distribution of perfective and imperfective verbs in the following situations: states, activities, accomplishments, achievements, and semelfactiveness. The chapter then presents usage types of verbal aspect in Slavic languages, differentiating the western and the eastern types. The next section discusses verbal aspect in a diachronic perspective. The final section of this chapter outlines current lines of research in the field of Slavic verb aspect.