Problems of stress

[John Dunn]

It was only recently vouchsafed to me (though it may be well known to others) that both English and Russian (at least in its standard akajushchij form) are stress-timed languages, that is in ordinary speech the intervals between stresses are approximately equal.  One consequence of this is that long sequences of unstressed syllables are problematic, so that words such as Vsévolodovna* are extremely difficult to pronounce.  English tends to obviate the problem either by stress displacement (cóntroversy > contróversy) or with secondary stresses (àntidìsestàblishmentárianism[?]).§  In Russian use of stress displacement for this purpose is rare or non-existent (ná golovu > na gólovu??), and, at least in standard accounts, use of secondary stress is limited to certain specific environments.  Instead, the tendency is to 'lose' some of the unstressed syllables, so that the above-mentioned patronymic comes out sounding something like Sevovna.

It is, however, my impression that in recent times there has been an increasing tendency in Russian to resort to the expedient of secondary stresses, especially in sequences involving prefixes or prepositions, leading to the appearance of such forms as: 
pòzavcherá
chèrez nedélju

In this connection I note that some recent dictionaries are marking certain two-syllable propositions (e.g. pered) as having independent stress, whereas older dictionaries indicate them as unstressed.  

Perhaps this is all well-known, but would anyone care to comment?

John Dunn.

*Apologies for the transliteration, but stressed Russian turns to mincemeat in some e-mail programmes.
§ And, yes, I do know that different varieties of English may adopt different solutions and that with some words different solutions may be preferred by different speakers of the same variety.


John Dunn
Honorary Research Fellow, SMLC (Slavonic Studies)
University of Glasgow, Scotland

Address:
Via Carolina Coronedi Berti 6
40137 Bologna
Italy
Tel.: +39 051/1889 8661
e-mail: J.Dunn at slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk
johnanthony.dunn at fastwebnet.it

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