Phonological Patterns in the Russian Lexicon

大多数语言都有限制规则，只适用于符合条件的单词子集：因此，英语中有像the [f]/ the [v]es这样的单词，还有chie[f]/chie[f]s和pee[v]e/pee[v]es。另一个著名的例子来自俄语，当添加后缀时，某些单词的元音会被删除（veter/vetr-a 'wind/of wind‘），但其他单词则不会（kater/kater-a ’a boat/of a boat'）。尽管在过去的四十年中，俄语缺失现象受到了音系学家的广泛关注，但从未使用定量可靠的方法对其进行过研究，并且遗漏了一些重要的概括。这条规则被认为是不可预测的，因此语言学家将删除的元音标记为抽象的不同，并专注于删除如何与俄语的其他规则相互作用。这项提议的研究调查了这样一种假设，即人们确实对受限制规则影响的单词的形状有无意识的认识，并且他们可以在实验环境中证明这种认识。PI及其同事最近的实验工作表明，说俄语的人知道，双音节单词比单音节单词更容易出现元音缺失：即使有像[rot/rt-a]“a mouth/of a mouth”这样的单词，它们在词典中也只占少数。讲俄语的人也注意音节结构，这与传统的描述相反：尽管俄语有一些相当奇特的辅音集群，但当它们是由元音删除造成的时，人们会拒绝它们。计划中的实验将在俄罗斯和美国与以俄语为母语的人一起进行，将调查俄语现有和假设单词的语音和形态变化，重点关注名词屈折和小构词。该项目将产生关于这一长期问题的大量定量可靠数据。它还将训练研究生和本科生的实验和语料库方法，这在音韵学中变得越来越重要。

Most languages have restricted rules that apply only to a subset of eligible words: thus, English has words like thie[f]/thie[v]es alongside chie[f]/chie[f]s and pee[v]e/pee[v]es. Another famous example comes from Russian, where vowels delete in some words when a suffix is added (veter/vetr-a 'wind/of wind') but not others (kater/kater-a 'a boat/of a boat'). Even though Russian deletion has received a lot of attention from phonologists over the past forty years, it has never been studied using quantitatively robust methodology, and some important generalizations were missed. The rule was thought to apply unpredictably, so linguists marked the deleting vowels as abstractly different and focused on how deletion interacted with other rules of Russian.The proposed research investigates the hypothesis that people do have unconscious knowledge about the shapes of words that undergo restricted rules, and they can demonstrate this knowledge in experimental settings. Recent experimental work by the PI and colleagues shows that Russian speakers know that disyllabic words are more likely to have vowel deletion than monosyllabic words: even though there are words like [rot/rt-a] 'a mouth/of a mouth', they are a small minority in the lexicon. Russian speakers also pay attention to syllable structure, contrary to traditional descriptions: even though Russian has some rather exotic consonant clusters, people reject them when they result from vowel deletion.The planned experiments, conducted in Russia and in the US with native Russian speakers, will investigate phonological and morphological alternations in existing and hypothetical words of Russian, with a focus on noun inflection and diminutive formation. The project will yield extensive quantitatively robust data on this longstanding problem. It will also train graduate and undergraduate students in experimental and corpus methodologies, which are becoming increasingly important in phonology.