Pol otveta

[Georges Adassovsky]

At 11:52 PM 8/12/97, Loren Billings wrote:

>Dear colleagues,
>
>I'm wondering if any of you know a phonetic distinction between the
>following two _so^cetanija_:
>
>1.  pol komnaty "floor of room"
>
>2.  polkomnaty  "half of room"
>
>I already know the following:  Whereas /o/ after a non-palatalized
>consonant reduces to [a] or [@] (=schwa), depending on whether it's in
>first-pretonic unstressed syllable or not (e.g., /moloko/ --> [m at laKO]
>"milk"), the /o/ in _pol_ "1/2" always retains lip-rounding (i.e., example
>1. above is never *[p at l...] or *[pal...], but always [pol...]).
>
>Still, it seems to my ear that 1. and 2. are phonetically distinct; 1.
>behaves like a so-called stump compound (like _zavkafedry_ "department
>head"), while 2. is a combination of two morphological words with separate
>word stresses (but phrasal emphasis only on the second word).

It seems to me that 1 is pronounced with two stresses, two full "o"  and a
little stop between the two words, while 2 has only one stress, no
stopping, and the first "o" may be a little reduced or not depending on the
speaker. Some speakers may also reduce the "l" (w).
But depending on the context, il is also possible to put emphasis on "pol"
in 2. In this case, the "o" would receive a large stress, but there would
be no stopping between "l" and "k".
Difficult to establish a general rule without context. Is the utterer
speaking about some neutral "half a room", or is he willing to tell "a part
of the room as large as its half" ?

Georges Adassovsky
E-Mail : Gadassov at mail.pf
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