Skip to content
Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton January 28, 2011

The phonology of boundaries and secondary stress in Russian compounds

  • Maria Gouskova EMAIL logo
From the journal The Linguistic Review

Abstract

In Russian, the phonological diagnostics for prosodic words conflict when applied to compounds. On the one hand, compounds can have multiple stresses (oboròn-o-sposóbnost' ‘defense-linker-capability’), whereas single-root words can only have a single stress. On the other hand, non-stress rules such as word-final devoicing and vowel reduction treat compounds as single prosodic words. Based on this and other kinds of evidence, I demonstrate that compounds are indeed single prosodic words, though they are required to have a stress for each sub-stem. Secondary stress patterns in compounds also provide some clues as to the location of default stress in what is an almost entirely lexical stress system.

Published Online: 2011-01-28
Published in Print: 2010-December

©Walter de Gruyter

Downloaded on 23.4.2024 from https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/tlir.2010.015/html
Scroll to top button