Problems of stress

[Maria Dmytrieva]

Dear John,    as you say yourself,     > the tendency is to 'lose' some of the unstressed syllables, so that the above-mentioned patronymic comes out sounding something like Sevovna.     this form can be connected to the colloquial form of the name Vsevolod -- Seva. I would say that the more possible variant would be closer to Vsevovna.     and a classical example of contraction in full forms of names would be Alexandr Alexandrovich -- San-Sanych.    my name would sound intead of Mar_i_ya Nikol_a_yevna -- M_a_rya Nikol_a_vna.          > 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:     
> pzavcher    
> chrez nedlju    
    these are not secondary  stresses. this way of speech is characteristic for Moscow and couple of other cities, like Voronezh.     this pronunciation is recognized all over post-Soviet space as 'Moscow'.     it has a couple of particular features one of them is the one you noticed -- reduction of the stressed syllable and prolongation of the preceding sylalble which a result sounds as it stressed but in the speech the general rhythm still follows the normative stresses of the words so the speech sounds kind of syncopated.          
With best regards,    
Maria    
    
--    
Mariya M. Dmytriyeva    
Fulbright Scholar,    
California State University, Northridge    
Linguistics Program, 2007-2009    
    
--    
HeadHunter:Украина -     http://www.hh.ua Элитные вакансии компаний.    
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