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Article published In:
Variation in phonology
Edited by Péter Szigetvári
[Linguistic Variation 20:1] 2020
► pp. 33–55
Special issue article

Lexical stress variation and rhythmic alternation in Russian

A pilot study

| MIT
| HSE

Our paper investigates lexical stress placement variation in Modern Standard Russian past tense verbal forms. This kind of variation has arisen due to complex interactions of various processes in the development of Russian and its present-day state is said (often rather impressionistically) to be conditioned by intra-speaker sociolinguistic factors. However, cases of inter-speaker variation can also be observed. We put forward a proposal that stress placement in forms with variable stress is influenced by the rhythmic pattern of immediate linear context. To support this, we report on a pilot experiment that shows a preference towards alternating rhythm in a sequence consisting of a past tense verbal form of a transitive verb and its direct object, thus conforming to the fundamental principle of rhythmic alternation. The results also raise some questions about the phonology of stress and stress variation in Russian and beyond.

Keywords: lexical stress, rhythm, Russian language, stress variation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Lexical stress in Standard Russian
    • 1.2Verbal past tense morphology
  • 2.The history of stress variation in past tense forms
  • 3.Observations on stress variation in past tense forms
    • 3.1Parameters of variation
    • 3.2The Rhythmic Hypothesis
  • 4.Data, experiment, and analysis
    • 4.1Corpora as sources for studying context-dependent variation
    • 4.2Experiment
      • 4.2.1Stimuli
      • 4.2.2Null hypothesis
      • 4.2.3Design
      • 4.2.4Participants
    • 4.3Results and discussion
  • 5.Implications for the phonological interpretation of stress variation
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 January 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.16013.kuk
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