VOCALISM OF RUSSIAN HOMONYMIC CLITICS AS A MEANS OF GRAMMATICAL DIFFERENTIATION

The study investigates qualitative vowel reduction in sets and pairs of Russian unstressed homonyms to explore morphological impact on clitics’ phonological appearance. Russian clitics belong to several parts of speech, such as particles, prepositions, conjunctions and pronouns, and many Russian particle and conjunction clitics derive from adverbs and pronouns, which leads to functional homonymy. To analyze the impact of word class on vowel phonology in Russian clitics, an experiment was designed. Unrelated sentences constructed to illustrate different contextual variables and containing clitic groups were read out loud by Russian native speakers, and vowels in the clitics were then audially analyzed. Main findings include two general tendencies: contrast between content and function words and functional differentiation among function words. Both are reflected through different degrees of variation in reduction rate, a lower degree of variation generally corresponding to a less ‘autonomous’ grammatical status. Several pairs of clitics belonging to different parts of speech demonstrated minimal or no contrast in vowel reduction rate; however, this fact reflects functional proximity of the units. Phonological appearance of the clitics also reveals complex threshold phenomena in sets of clitics through a smooth change in variation rate rather than sharp contrast.