Phonological default in the lexical stress system of Russian: Evidence from noun declension

Abstract

Russian is known to be an unpredictable stress language, where stress is not fixed to a particular location within a certain phonological domain, but rather marked lexically for a number of individual morphemes (e.g., roots and affixes). Despite its true lexical nature, when roots are unaccented or when dominant affixes delete the base accent, a default accent is argued to emerge. The default stress positions proposed for Russian, however, are far from unified: word-initial (e.g., Melvold, 1990), stem-final (Crosswhite et al., 2003), and post-stem (Alderete, 2001). In this paper, we present results from two production studies, where we investigated stress realization by Russian native speakers in novel words that crucially lacked morphological information. In Study 1, we used a group of indeclinable novel place names in a map reading and a schedule description task. Study 2 was intended to extend the findings to another set of indeclinable words, novel acronyms, in a reading task. The classes of words we used in these two studies enabled us to control for the confounding effects of morphology, a serious problem in previous experimental studies on Russian stress (e.g., Crosswhite, 2000). We also tested the potential contribution of vowel quality (back/front) in the last two syllables, type of penultimate syllable (closed/open), as well as word length (two-/three-syllable) to stress assignment. The following default patterns robustly emerged from these two studies: final stress in consonant-final words, and penultimate stress in vowel-final words. Furthermore, the type of final segment was the strongest predictor accounting for stress placement, as opposed to word length and vowel quality. The results from Study 2, which used only vowel-final acronyms, corroborated these findings: about 78% of the acronyms were stressed on the penultimate syllable, the quality of the final vowel playing no significant role in stress assignment. Contra Crosswhite et al. (2003), our results suggest that the default stress cannot be stem-final since about 85% of vowel-final words in both studies revealed penultimate stress. Instead, we argue that the default stress pattern in Russian is best characterized by a metrical system that employs trochees built at the right word-edge. Since consonant-final words must receive a vowel when inflected, our analysis provides a unified account of default stress in both consonant- and vowel-final words, and finds empirical support from diachronic and dialectal facts, as well as loan word adaptations.