Scholarly record

PHONETIC REDUCTION OF NOUN PHRASES IN SPONTANEOUS RUSSIAN

E. I. Riekhakaynen, A. S. Smirnov

Abstract

In the paper, we provide the results of a corpus-based study aimed to formulate hypotheses on how a listener manages to restore essential grammatical information missing in a spoken signal due to the reduction of endings in Russian noun phrases. We checked whether there are any reduced elements in the endings of all noun phrases with adjectives, participles, possessive pronouns or ordinal numerals as dependent elements in the Corpus of Transcribed Russian Oral Texts (http://narusco.ru/search/trn-search.php; overall duration - 115 min.). We regarded an ending of a word form as reduced if there was at least one omitted sound or at least one consonant or stressed vowel substituted for another sound compared to the canonical pronunciation of the word form. In 595 (73.5%) out of 809 noun phrases analyzed, the reduction of endings occurred in one or more words. Most often (334 cases; 41.3%) the reduction affected only dependent element(s) in a noun phrase the noun ending remaining intact. The reduction only in the ending of the noun occurred in 11.4% of all phrases. We also found 169 phrases (20.9%) where the endings of all elements suffered from reduction. In the paper, we look through the latter cases in order to show that the left grammatical context helps in choosing the correct interpretation in the majority of them. We also show what case forms of nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals are more likely to be reduced according to our data. We argue that the results we obtained are crucial for the development of the functional model of spoken word recognition as they show how often a listener has to solve grammatical ambiguity while recognizing spontaneous speech and how contextual factors can contribute to the process. The quantitative data we got can be also referred as a comparison base while studying the acquisition of spontaneous speech both by native Russian children and students learning Russian as a foreign language.

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