Khlebo, Kresto and Payoko in Arkhangel’sk Dialects: Are they Conditioned by Phonetics?

Abstract

The paper reports new findings concerning the distribution of Nom. and Acc. Sing. Musc. -o nominal forms and forms with postpositive particles -ot and -to in seven Northern Russian dialects spoken in the Pinezhsky, Plesetsky, Verkhnetoemsky, Mezensky, Leshukonsky and Vinogradovsky districts of Arkhangel’sk region based on the material of dialectal speech corpora and tape recordings of dialectal speech made in the period of 1987 – 1999 (total duration – 41,3 hours). The study reveals 1) an explicit mutual dependence of the -о and -оt forms in the dialects considered (the fraction of the -оt forms decrease significantly with the presence of -o forms), and 2) a clear tendency to the positional distribution of the -о and -оt forms depending on the right phonetic context (a pause, a vowel, a fricative or a plosive consonant) with the minimum number of the -оt forms before gomoranic stop consonants. This may serve as an essential argument in favor of the hypothesis suggesting the phonetic evolution whenever in the past of the -о forms from those of -ot, leading to the decay of the initial regular grammatical and/or phonetical agreement of a of Nom. and Acc. Musc. noun and the postpositive particle’s “correct” -ot form and to the extended distribution of uncoordinated -to form of the particle in this context.