The history of Slavic prosody gives an account of Slavic languages at the time of their differentiation and relates these developments to issues in phonological theory. It is first argued that the syllable structure of Slavic changes before the fall of the jers and suggests that intra- and intersyllabic reorganization in Late Common Slavic was far more significant for Slavic prosody than the loss of weak jers. A case is then made for the existence of a bisyllabic prosodic domain in Late Common Slavic and trochaic metrical organization. One significant finding is that the syllabic trochee was supported by a redistribution of quantity. Finally, the implications of Slavic data for phonological theory are considered, with a discussion of sonority, skeletal structure, the representation of length and prominence, and language typology. By demonstrating that a nonlinear representation of the syllable together with a notion of constraint interaction can account for a wide range of data, the study takes a position on the nature of phonological representation and on a model of language change. In its attention to the history of selected problems of Slavic linguistics, it also offers a detailed survey of the field. Contains 937 references. (Author/MSE)