Janina Molczanow

Metrical systems differ in patterns of stress assignment, the domains over which those patterns are built, and acoustic manifestations of stress. It has been widely debated in the phonological/phonetic literature how stress should be represented, what mechanisms govern its assignment, and whether the phonetic underpinnings of primary/secondary stress exist independently of other prominence effects (e.g. boundary strengthening, pitch accents). This Element addresses these fundamental issues on the basis of an in-depth study of a hybrid (lexical-grammatical) metrical system of Ukrainian. It synthesizes previous results with new findings, focusing on the phonetic as well as formal description of the Ukrainian system. The lexical-grammatical stress interactions in Ukrainian pose a challenge for current metrical theories, shed light on the relation between the lexical and grammatical stress domains, and the relationship between categorical and gradient aspects of the metrical system. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Metrical systems differ in patterns of stress assignment, the domains over which those patterns are built, and acoustic manifestations of stress. It has been widely debated in the phonological/phonetic literature how stress should be represented, what mechanisms govern its assignment, and whether the phonetic underpinnings of primary/secondary stress exist independently of other prominence effects (e.g. boundary strengthening, pitch accents). This Element addresses these fundamental issues on the basis of an in-depth study of a hybrid (lexical-grammatical) metrical system of Ukrainian. It synthesizes previous results with new findings, focusing on the phonetic as well as formal description of the Ukrainian system. The lexical-grammatical stress interactions in Ukrainian pose a challenge for current metrical theories, shed light on the relation between the lexical and grammatical stress domains, and the relationship between categorical and gradient aspects of the metrical system. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This book develops an Optimality-theoretic model of the interaction of phonological tone with segmental sonority, arguing that tone can interact directly with vowel quality without mediating factors such as syllable structure or duration. The proposal is tested against rich and complex patterns of vowel reduction in East Slavic dialects. Though the idea that tone constitutes a part of the phonological system of some Slavic languages has been around for decades, the relationship between tone and vowel reduction has not been systematically explored in previous studies. A tone-based model developed in this book unifies many apparently disparate phenomena by proposing a limited set of constraints, whose minimal re-rankings yield the attested East Slavic vocalic patterns. On the descriptive side, this study formulates novel generalisations and presents linguistic data not previously discussed in generative linguistics. This book will be of use to students and scholars interested in phonology, Slavic languages, and the theory of grammar in general.