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Suomalais-Ugrilaisen Seuran
Toimituksia 245
Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne
245
Ilse Lehiste, Niina Aasmäe,
Einar Meister, Karl Pajusalu, Pire Teras &
Tiit-Rein Viitso
Erzya prosody
Introduction
The position of Erzya among the
Finno-Ugric languages has been considered to be exceptional in
many respects. Its grammar is extraordinarily rich in complex
suffixal forms and morphosyntactic categories. Erzya is the
language with the smallest vowel inventory in the Finno-Ugric
family (cf. Zaicz 1998). One of the most mysterious research
prob1ems concerning Erzya is its prosodic system. As a rule,
Finno-Ugric languages have fixed word stress; Erzya is claimed
to have free stress, and some linguists have argued that there
is no prominent word stress in Erzya at all. According to a
widely accepted point of view, Erzya has neither contrastive
quantity nor tone. To be sure, it has to be taken into
consideration that acoustic measurements concerning the sound
system of Erzya have been scanty up to now. The main purpose
of this book is to provide researchers with new, accurate data
about the phonetic characteristics of Erzya prosody that might
facilitate solving the old mysteries of Erzya prosody.
Moksha is a close linguistic cognate of
Erzya; together they are traditionally seen to constitute the
Mordvin language(s). But Erzya and Moksha differ in many
respects, including word stress. The Mordvin languages that
are spoken in the center of the Finno-Ugric language territory
have been assigned a key position in several discussions
concerning the historical development and typology of
Finno-Ugric languages. This is true regarding prosodic
phenomena such as word stress as well.
The only three Finno-Ugric languages the
sound systems of which have been systematically described are
Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian. The basic characteristics of
their prosody are surprisingly similar (cf. Ross and Lehiste
2001; Abondolo 1998). They all have phonological distinctions
between short and long phonemes and no tonal contrasts that
are independent of other prosodic features. They are all
characterized by fixed word stress that does not, as a rule,
distinguish between lexical and/or grammatical meanings. In
native vocabulary, primary word-level stress is assigned to
the first syllable, and secondary stress to successive
odd-numbered syllables. Because of the phonemic quantity
contrast, stress is not manifested by lengthening of the
stressed syllable. Differences in vowel quality between
stressed and unstressed syllables are relatively insignificant,
and tone is not independently contrastive (although it plays a
part in distinguishing between long and overlong quantities in
Estonian). All these languages have dynamic word stress,
characterized by greater intensity and loudness of the
stressed syllable.
There are, however, differences between
the prosodic systems of Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian. In
Estonian, long vowels occur only in syllables with primary
stress – the first syllables of words. There is also a
difference in the inventory of vowels that can occur in
word-initial syllables and in other positions in the word: all
nine vowels (and most of the numerous diphthongs) occur in the
first syllable, while only a very restricted set of syllable
nuclei can appear in non-first syllables. Thus it is possible
to predict the position of primary stress on the basis of
several prosodic and distributional properties of the
syllables. Stress can be found on non-initial syllables in
foreign words, and it can shift to non-initial syllables in
some southern dialects as a consequence of cliticization (Viitso
1990). In Hungarian, sentence stress rules of many types can
influence the location of word stress. In fact, Finnish
appears to be the most stable with respect to maintaining
word-initial primary stress. But there exist complicated rules
of the placement of secondary stress, which depend on the
structure of non-initial syllables, such as the length and
sonority of the syllable. Our goal is to provide data for
Erzya that would make the Erzya system comparable to the
better-known prosodic systems of Estonian, Finnish and
Hungarian. The material offered in the present book
constitutes a first step in this direction.
The book contains two main parts. In the
first part (Chapter 2), previous studies of the prosody of
Erzya are surveyed. The chapter focuses on earlier acoustic
analyses of Erzya prosodic features, treatments of Erzya
phonology, and diachronic and typological studies of Mordvin
in general and Erzya in particular. The objective of this
review is to bring forward research questions relevant to
solving the puzzle of Erzya prosody.
The second main part of the study (Chapter
3) presents the results of our experimental research. The
analysis concentrates on the role of quantity and stress in
the Erzya prosodic system. The duration of sounds, the
acoustical structure of vowels, and the fundamental frequency
are measured in a corpus of test sentences. (Details of the
measurements are included in the Appendix 3). Primary
attention is directed toward the description of differences
between stressed and unstressed syllables occurring in
phrase-final and sentence-final positions. The location of
stress was determined by a native speaker of Erzya (Niina
Aasmäe) and by a trained phonetician who is also a native
speaker of Estonian (Ilse Lehiste). The cases where there was
a difference in the opinions of the two listeners are treated
in some detail. The main problems discussed in the chapter are
related to the nature of Erzya word stress:
(a) If there is no quantity contrast,
are differences in duration used to signal word-level stress?
(b) If vowel reduction is found in Erzya,
is vowel quality an indicator of the position of stress?
(c) Is there a difference in fundamental
frequency between stressed and unstressed syllables?
(d) If there is dynamic stress in Erzya,
how is it related to sentence intonation?
In the concluding chapter (Chapter 4) we
compare, from a typological point of view, the results of our
acoustic analyses with previous statements concerning the
prosody of Erzya. We are also looking for an answer to the
question to what an extent and in which sense the
characteristics of Erzya prosody resemble those of the Finnic
languages and Hungarian. We are aware of the fact that our
research is only a provisional attempt to describe the
regularities of the Erzya prosodic system, but we hope that it
will provide a perspective for other researchers to follow.
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