Most languages have restricted rules that apply only to a subset of eligible words: thus, English has words like thie[f]/thie[v]es alongside chie[f]/chie[f]s and pee[v]e/pee[v]es. Another famous example comes from Russian, where vowels delete in some words when a suffix is added (veter/vetr-a 'wind/of wind') but not others (kater/kater-a 'a boat/of a boat'). Even though Russian deletion has received a lot of attention from phonologists over the past forty years, it has never been studied using quantitatively robust methodology, and some important generalizations were missed. The rule was thought to apply unpredictably, so linguists marked the deleting vowels as abstractly different and focused on how deletion interacted with other rules of Russian.
The proposed research investigates the hypothesis that people do have unconscious knowledge about the shapes of words that undergo restricted rules, and they can demonstrate this knowledge in experimental settings. Recent experimental work by the PI and colleagues shows that Russian speakers know that disyllabic words are more likely to have vowel deletion than monosyllabic words: even though there are words like [rot/rt-a] 'a mouth/of a mouth', they are a small minority in the lexicon. Russian speakers also pay attention to syllable structure, contrary to traditional descriptions: even though Russian has some rather exotic consonant clusters, people reject them when they result from vowel deletion.
The planned experiments, conducted in Russia and in the US with native Russian speakers, will investigate phonological and morphological alternations in existing and hypothetical words of Russian, with a focus on noun inflection and diminutive formation. The project will yield extensive quantitatively robust data on this longstanding problem. It will also train graduate and undergraduate students in experimental and corpus methodologies, which are becoming increasingly important in phonology.
