VOWEL REDUCTION IN SOUTHERN RUSSIAN DISSIMILATIVE DIALECTS

The paper shows that the development of pretonic vocalism in South Russian dialects is directly conditioned by changes occurring in the rhythmic and prosodic structure of the phonetic word. It is the rhythmic structure of the word that is immediately involved in the formation of articulatory program, which in turn determines the main regularities of the linear sound sequence. In these dialects a consistent link between segmental andsuprasegmentallevels has been observed. Articulatory and acoustic features of pretonic vowels cannot be separated from the prosody of the utterance, while tendencies in the development of vowel systems can only be revealed from the perspective of speech prosody. The greater involvement of all vowel (primarily in pre-stress position) in positional interchange and interdependence between vowels in the word contextmake forabsenceof unstressed vowels reduced to zero in the dialects with dissimilative akanye. There are two reductional types in this dialects: «donskoj» and «kaluzhskij», named after regions of its fixation.