Prosodic Structure of Russian : A Psycholinguistic Investigation of the Metrical Structure of Russian Nouns

Abstract

Russian is an unpredictable stress language, where stress is not fixed to a particular morpheme or a syllable, but is rather assumed to be marked lexically for each morpheme (roots and affixes). Although Russian lexical stress and factors determining its location in a word have been extensively examined, it is not clear whether there are some phonological properties that may influence the location of stress. In this dissertation, I investigate non-lexical stress placement in Russian, i.e. the default stress placement expected to arise whenever there is no lexically specified accent in a word and explore which phonological factors affect stress placement in Russian. In particular, I ask (i) which principles govern the assignment of stress in the absence of lexical information, and (ii) whether the default stress emanates from a particular foot type (trochee or iamb) that underlies the Russian prosodic system.Previous research on the Russian default stress pattern and metrical structure has yielded conflicting results and incoherent description of facts. The proposed default positions of stress range from word-initial (Melvold 1990), stem-final (Crosswhite et al. 2003) to post-stem (Alderete 2001). Analyses of the type of metrical foot in Russian also diverge remarkably: Revithiadou (1999) claims that Russian has a trochaic foot, van der Hulst (1999) and Hayes (1995) classify Russian as an unbounded lexical accent system, whereas Halle & Vergnaud (1987), Melvold (1990), Crosswhite (2000) argue for an iambic foot. Previous experimental studies that attempted to reveal speakers' underlying knowledge, however, fail to tease apart the contribution of morphological information from purely phonological grounds in default stress assignment (e.g., Crosswhite et al. 2003).In this dissertation, I present results from a series of production studies that examined the default stress pattern in Russian novel words without lexically pre-specified accent. The first two experiments controlled for the various inconsistencies in previous studies by using a group of indeclinable words, in particular place names and acronyms, which permitted the exclusion of morphological factors. The findings revealed the following default pattern: final stress in consonant-final words, penultimate stress in vowel-final words. I provide a unified account of default stress in both consonant- and vowel-final words by assuming that all Russian words (including consonant-final ones) underlyingly end in a vowel. In light of these findings as well as diachronic and typological observations, I claim that the phonological default stress pattern in Russian is a syllabic trochee built from the right word-edge in both indeclinable and declinable words.The third experiment investigated prominence relations in novel compounds with the primary objective being to understand whether an underlying metrical structure, presumably the trochee, plays a role in secondary stress assignment in Russian. The primary assumption here was that rhythmic prominences should emerge from a phonological stress mechanism that assigns default stress since secondary stress placement may not be assigned in the lexicon (there is no underlying accent within the root). The elicited compounds were characterized by consistent rhythmic patterns: compounds with three- and four pre-stressed syllables got secondary stress predominantly on the initial syllable whereas the preferred position of stress for compounds with five pre-stressed syllables was the second syllable. The results indicate that rhythmic secondary stress is assigned by means of left-headed metrical feet constructed from right to left starting from the linking vowel. Based on these findings, I argue that the trochaic foot underlies the Russian metrical structure and emerges in both default stress and rhythmic alternations.