A quantitative study of phonetic ellipsis in Moscow Russian

Charles Paus

Fri. 9-10:40 A

Various types of elision are characteristic of most spoken registers of Russian. In this study, which is based on a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews carried out in Moscow during 1993-4 with 54 Russian speakers, two such features are examined: 1) hyperreduction or deletion of unstressed vowels, and 2) lenition or deaffricatization of /c/ (i.e., its realization as a fricative /s/).

Both phenomena appear to be phonetically motivated, examples of a special category of sociolinguistic variable sometimes referred to as Connected Speech Processes (cf. Dressler and Wodak 1982, Kerswill 1987). Quantitative data suggest that both types of elision under study come about in response to pressure to reduce the complexity of certain types of articulatory sequences. The amount of articulatory effort which may be save by elision of a given segment varies according to the environment in which the segment occurs. Generally speaking, the greater the potential savings in terms of articulatory effort, the more likely elision is to occur. In many environments, a certain lack of attention to linguistic form seems to be a necessary condition for elision to occur, and its incidence is extremely low in reading and word list styles.

Despite the fact that both types of elision appear to be motivated by articulatory factors, which one might assume would apply equally to all speakers, they present different social profiles. Gender differentiation is especially striking; hyperreduction/deletion of unstressed vowels is favored to a greater extent by females, while deaffricated realizations of /c/ are favored to a greater extent by males. Both processes are favored by younger age and lower educational level, but the interactions of age and educational level with gender are different for each. The data thus show that two different elliptic processes, both of which arise out of uniform pressures to simplify articulation, can take on different meanings of social identity.

References

Dressler, W. and Wodak, R. 1982. Sociophonological methods in the study of sociolinguistic variation in Viennese German. Language in Society 11:1, 339-70.

Kerswill, P. 1987. Levels of linguistic variation in Durham. Journal of Linguistics 23:1, 25-50.