Morphological Aspects of Russian Spelling

Abstract

Teachers of Russian are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of the formal study of morphology, both inflectional and derivational, for improving the student's ability to produce and recognize forms. In general, however, courses which treat morphology have not dealt adequately, if at all, with the relevant aspects of the spelling system. Specifically, they have not made explicit the regularities which obtain in the orthographic representation of morphemes.' It is the purpose of this paper to define these regularities and comment on their pedagogical value. The Russian spelling system is alphabetic. That is to say, its minimal unit of representation is the phoneme.2 Hence in considering its morphological aspects we are in effect attempting to determine the manner in which it reflects the changes that may occur in the phonemic composition of morphemes. These are the changes traditionally termed MORPHOPHONEMIC, the most important of which are replacement of velar or dental consonant by palatal consonant, replacement of nonpalatalized consonant by its palatalized counterpart, deletion of a segment, assimilation of a segment in point or manner of articulation, and vowel reduction-. With regard to orthographic representation, morphophonemic changes in Russian are either SPELLED, in which case underlying and surface alternants both appear in written forms (e.g., inf. pisat', lsg. pigu, where s and 9 both appear), or they are UNSPELLED, in which case the underlying alternant alone appears (e.g., nom. sg. [sat], gen. sg. [sAda], where d appears throughout). Spelled morphophonemic changes include replacement of velar or dental by palatal, replacement of nonpalatalized consonant by its palatalized counterpart, and deletion of a segment. Unspelled changes include consonant assimilation and vowel reduction.4 This difference in spelling correlates with an important difference in behavior; viz., spelled changes are NONAUTOMATIC (i.e., implemented under morphological conditions), while unspelled ones are AUTOMATIC (i.e., implemented under phonological conditions).5 It follows that the orthographic representation of a morphophonemic change in Russian can be predicted from its status in relation to the nonautomatic/automatic distinction.6 There are only three major