Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The East Slavic languages Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian have a fascinating word prosody, which has also caught Tore Nesset's attention.In his article "A FOOTnote to the Jers: The Russian Trochee-Iamb Shift and Cognitive Linguistics" (Nesset 2016), he explains the substantial changes in the prosody of the word in East Slavic following the fall and vocalization of the jers as a phonological change from trochaic to iambic feet, i.e. from a bisyllabic rhythmic unit with its head first to a unit with a final head.He does this in his usual clear and elegant style.Tore is interested in the structure behind the language we produce, without losing sight of the actual language users past and present.In the usage-based model in cognitive linguistics he applies, the grammar of a language, including its phonological system, is seen as generalizations that "grow out" of actual language usage events.Following Henning Andersen, Tore points out that each generation constructs a new grammarand phonology -based on the input of the previous generation (2016:374).This essay is about the fascinating, complex relationship between phonology and phonetics.Like Tore, I will address the interplay between actual language usage and phonological structure, but with phonetic data.I will try to show that actual, highly variable phonetic data can give evidence for a phonological rule.We will not discuss Tore's analysis of East Slavic word prosody (although we could: The application of metrical theory with binary feet to Russian is not unproblematic and Tore's analysis with an iambic foot is not generally accepted).Instead, we will look at first pretonic prominence in modern East Slavic, i.e. at the prominence expressed on the first, unstressed syllable of Tore's iambic foot.By prominence I mean that the vowel stands out in at least one of the acoustic parameters: duration, quality, loudness or tone.All modern East Slavic languages have first pretonic prominence, which is typologically uncommon: The vowel immediately preceding the stress is relatively long compared to other unstressed vowels, especially in Central Standard Russian, where the non-high
Author: Margje Post
Institution: University of Bergen
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7223940348