PRONUNCIATION PECULIARITIES OF RUSSIAN PREPOSITIONS AS AN OBJECT OF LEXICOGRAPHY


2023. № 4 (38), 273-291

Vinogradov Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Abstract:

The article analyzed lexicographic description of pronunciation peculiarities of prepositions in Russian language dictionaries of the second half of twentieth — the beginning of the twenty-fi rst centuries. It was revealed that in the twentieth century the refl ection of segmental phonetic peculiarities of Russian prepositions had been superfi cial and absent in many necessary cases. It was partly corrected in the twenty fi rst century, although from now on some specifi c features of prepositions’ phonetic behaviour have been remaining unnoticed in Russian language dictionaries. In the future it is important to refl ect, for example, variable fi nal hard consonant phoneme realizations in some prepositions before soft consonant of the next word (бе[з‿н’]и́х or бе[з’‿н’]и́х ‘without them’, и[з‿в’]едра́ or и[з’‿в’]едра́ ‘from a bucket’, и[з‿jа́]мы or и[з’‿jа́]мы ‘from a pit’ etc.), to describe the pronunciation of unstressed and unreduced qualitatively vowel in a preposition (cases like вн[э‿са́]да or вн[иэ‿са́]да ‘outside a garden’) more consistently etc. At the same time from the eighties of the twentieth century supersegmental pronunciation peculiarities had been fi xed better than segmental ones, and in the beginning of the twenty fi rst century their description became more detailed. It is worth mentioning that, as the analysis shows, in accentological dictionaries prosodic peculiarities of prepositions are refl ected worse than in other orthoepic dictionaries, which should be corrected. In general, the next step in this direction is specifying the conditions, influencing fluctuations between the unstressed and weak-stressed syllables, as well as preparing dictionary recommendations more suitable for literary usage.