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Nonce words show that Russian yer alternations are governed by the grammar

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Abstract

Even though vowel deletion in Russian is lexically-restricted, the identity of alternating vowels is partially predictable: only mid vowels delete, but even mid vowels cannot delete in some contexts. We report on two nonce word studies asking Russian speakers to rate paradigms in which a vowel was deleted. The ratings strongly correlated with the quality of the vowel: deletion of mid vowels was rated higher than deletion of high and low vowels. We also found that deletion in certain syllabic contexts was rated as ungrammatical: deletion cannot affect words that have a complex coda, and it cannot create clusters with a medial sonorant. Finally, deletion in disyllables was rated higher than deletion in monosyllables, reflecting the trends in the lexicon. These results suggest that even for this lexically-restricted alternation, speakers have formed a phonological generalization.

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Notes

  1. Yers, or jers, are named after the Old Church Slavonic letters Ь and Ъ, which were used to write the historical ancestors of modern alternating vowels. All Slavic languages have inherited vowel-zero alternations that can be traced to the proto-language, so the term is not specific to Russian (see Jetchev 1997 for Bulgarian; Zec 1988 et seq. for Serbo-Croatian; Kenstowicz and Rubach 1987 for Slovak; Bethin 1992; Rowicka 1999 and many others for Polish).

  2. The following abbreviations are used in glosses: “nom” for “nominative”, “dat” for “dative”, “gen” for “genitive”, “acc” for “accusative”, “inst” for “instrumental”, “sg” for “singular”, “pl” for “plural”, “adj” for “adjective”, “pred” for “predicative”, “dim” for “diminutive”, “masc” for “masculine”, “fem” for “feminine”. All the data are transcribed in IPA and come from one of the authors, unless otherwise indicated. Stress is shown with an acute accent on the vowel that bears it. Yer alternations often cooccur with palatalization alternations; we transcribe but do not analyze them. See Iosad and Morén-Duolljá (2010) and Padgett (2010) for recent discussions of palatalization in Russian.

  3. The first syllable of [kòntr-pr jid-laƷ-énj-ij-ə] has secondary stress because the prefix is exceptional; normally, non-compound phonological words in Russian have only one stress (Gouskova 2010).

  4. This analysis is largely parallel to Gouskova (2012), except that we use constraint cloning rather than Pater-style lexical indexation. The difference between Pater’s (2006) lexical constraint indexation theory and the cloning theory of Becker et al. (2011) is minor. In Pater’s theory, exceptions are indexed to a higher-ranked version of a constraint, and the lower-ranked version of the constraint applies generally, to all items. In the theory of Becker et al., all lexical items are indexed to some constraint: thus, both the higher and the lower ranked clones of a constraint come with a list of morphemes that they apply to.

  5. We use comparative tableaux (Prince 2000). Each row contains a winner ≻ loser comparison, and columns show whether the constraint prefers the winner (W), the loser (L), or neither (empty cell). In a working grammar, at least one W precedes every L in any given candidate comparison row.

  6. Non-mid vowels do alternate with zero elsewhere in Russian. For example, the verbal reflexive suffix [-sja] is realized as [-sj] after vowels; discourse particles [Ʒə] and [bɨ] can also appear as [ʃ] and [p] respectively. Verbal stems have alternations of stressed [i] and other vowels with zero, which have been analyzed as yer deletion (see Gouskova 2012 for arguments against such analyses). In nouns, however, only mid vowels alternate.

  7. We assume that morphemes without mid vowels, such as /mudr/ ‘wise’ in (12c), are not indexed to either clone of *Mid, since they vacuously satisfy it. Nothing crucially depends on this, though—as Gouskova (2012) shows, the analysis works even if learners assume that these morphemes are indexed to *Mid reg .

  8. To implement this analysis explicitly, we would have to assume the Harmonic Serialism view of positional faithfulness constraints (Jesney 2011): since correct syllabification in the input is not guaranteed, faithfulness constraints cannot refer to the initial syllable of a root in the input; the constraints instead refer to the fully faithful candidate that is the first stage of a phonological derivation.

  9. Words such as [sot-ɨ] ‘honeycomb’ historically had yers (Vasmer 1958; Gouskova 2012) but have regularized over time. Monosyllabic words such as [ljot]∼[ljd-a] ‘ice (nom/gen sg)’ seem to be headed in the direction of regularization: they variably keep their vowels in compounds and with derivational suffixes, for example (Gouskova 2010:438–439). Another track for regularization in Russian has been to lose the yer vowel altogether: thus, [mgl-á] ‘mist’, which historically had a yer between the first two consonants, has a paradigm gap in the genitive plural instead of the expected *[mgol] or *[mogl] (cf. the Polish cognate [mgw-a]∼[mgjew]). For more on paradigm gaps in Russian, see Halle (1973) et seq.

  10. Analyses in this spirit have been proposed for many other lexically-restricted rules outside Slavic (Marlett and Stemberger 1983; Harris 1985; Inkelas and Orgun 1995; Martínez 2008).

  11. A reviewer suggests that the segment-by-segment analyses can be modified to capture the quality generalization: for example, in the moraless analysis, a faithfulness constraint MSeg-μ-[mid] could be ranked above the constraint against moraless vowels and thus prevent mora insertion on mid vowels alone. While it is possible to modify the segment-by-segment analyses in this way, doing so dissolves the very argument for segment-by-segment marking: after all, if the position and quality of alternating vowels follow from the phonological analysis, why do they need to be marked as special in the UR?

  12. Abstract segment-by-segment marking in the UR also does not entirely resolve the problem of lexically-restricted phonology: in Russian, vowel-zero alternation patterns differ in lexical categories, with verbs subject to some constraints and nouns to others (we only examine nouns in this paper). Additional mechanisms are needed to capture such differences.

  13. This is one of many arguments against suppletive allomorphy accounts of phonologically restricted alternations (see Wolf 2013 for more). The original “limited storage” argument against allomorphy and for unique/abstract underlying representations (Chomsky and Halle 1968; Bromberger and Halle 1989) has been challenged by psycholinguistic research (see Vaux 2003 for a detailed literature overview).

  14. The sites were http://odnoklassniki.ru and http://livejournal.com.

  15. One of the co-authors. Moscow Russian is considered to be the broadcast standard dialect.

  16. Prior work suggests that moving stress in Russian from its fixed location in lexically stressed words can result in significantly degraded grammaticality judgments (Gouskova 2010).

  17. The rating data from Experiments 1 and 2 are available at http://becker.phonologist.org/projects/russian/.

  18. A beanplot is a vertical density plot with a horizontal line to mark the mean. The thickest part of the bean corresponds to the greatest number of ratings at that level; thus, the most common rating given to polysyllables with final stress in which the vowel [e] alternates with zero is “7”, with “6” somewhat less common, and the rest of the ratings still less common. These graphs do not include error bars because they show the overall rating distribution for each category and are more informative than barplots or boxplots for rating data.

  19. The individual items’ ratings are: [kjest] 2.58, [stjek] 2.51, [kjetr] 1.37, [spol] 3.57, [motʃ] 2.48, [msjet] 3.22, [sotr] 2.55, [spjer] 3.57, [vosp] 2.17, [vsop] 3.07. Even within those CVCC and CCVC wugs whose clusters are almost completely matched, the CVCC wugs are comparatively worse: for [fsp], [fsop] 3.07≻[vosp] 2.17, for [spr/str], [spjer] 3.57≻[sotr] 2.55). Our statistical model includes a by-item random slope, so the individual variance is taken into account.

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Acknowledgements

For helpful comments and suggestions, we would like to thank Adam Albright, Ryan Bennett, Junko Ito, Heather Mahan, Armin Mester, Jaye Padgett, Donca Steriade, Colin Wilson, and audiences at New York University, UMass Amherst, the University of California, Santa Cruz, NELS 42, and LSA 86. We would also like to thank Anna Aristova, Yevgenia Gouskova, Vera Gribanova, Stephanie Harves, Pavel Iosad, Sofya Kasyanenko, Inna Livitz, Maria Minchenko, Barbara Partee, Amanda Rysling, as well as the many native Russian speakers for volunteering their time for our study. Special thanks to Junko Ito and the anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback, which has greatly improved the article. Please address correspondence to maria.gouskova@nyu.edu and michael.becker@phonologist.org.

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    Maria Gouskova & Michael Becker

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Appendix

Appendix

1.1 Test words used in Experiment 1

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    Monosyllables (25 pairs)

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    Disyllables (8 pairs, initial stress, all masculines)

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    10 disyllables (10 pairs, final stress)

1.2 Test words used in Experiment 2

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    Stress alternations in disyllables (6 pairs of each type)

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    Medial CCC clusters (all with alternating final stress)

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    Initial CC and CCC clusters

  1. (31)

    Control stimuli with deletion of [u] (6 pairs)

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Gouskova, M., Becker, M. Nonce words show that Russian yer alternations are governed by the grammar. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 31, 735–765 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-013-9197-5

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