ACCENTUATION OF NOUNS IN THE MODERN RUSSIAN STANDARD LANGUAGE: CODIFICATION VS USAGE


2023. № 4 (38), 117-135

Vinogradov Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Abstract:

This work studies the cases where the pronunciation adopted in the usage of modern literary language users sharply diverges from the accentological recommendations of the dictionaries. The article considers the cases where frequency variants of stress can even have prohibitive marks in dictionaries. The study concerns both orthoepic and other dictionaries, for example, explanatory ones; both prepared for release under the auspices of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and those not labeled by the Russian Academy of Sciences; both related to the last decade and published earlier. 
On the other hand, it is possible that the dictionaries do not contain information about obsolete variants that have been preserved in the speech of educated people due to knowledge of the texts of classical Russian literature, and the recommended pronunciation directly contradicts the examples from classical poetry. A special problem in the normative characteristic of accent variants is the problem of stylistic diversity (diff erentiation of pronunciation types) in orthoepy.
The analysis of such cases urges us to:
1) eliminate the contradictions between the normative recommendations of special orthoepic dictionaries and the usage of literary language speakers; 2) clarify the recommendations in orthoepic dictionaries by supplementing them with information about the status of variants that are not accepted in modern literary pronunciation, but are present in texts of Russian literature of the 18th-20th centuries; 3) add accent variants widespread in the usage, which for some reason did not come under scrutiny of lexicographers, to the dictionaries.