Unaccented vowels in Russian

Abstract

1. The first full-scale generative phonology of Russian is provided by Halle's epoch-making The Sound Pattern of Russian1, It is no criticism of this work to say that it treats only briefly the minutiae which form the core of this paper. Halle's phonetic surface rule 14a states that [a] becomes more lax in first pretonic position and in absolute initial unaccented position, while in all other positions [a] is heavily reduced. These two vowels are those symbolised in this paper as [л] and [э] respectively. Some manipulation in the application of the rule can account for some of the occurrences of [л] discussed below but not, it appears, for all of them, so that some positions in which [л] occurs according to Avanesov, whose description of the pronunciation of Russian2 serves as the basis of Halle's generative phonology, are unexplained. A fuller account of the distribution of [л] and [э] is to be found in Thelin3, whose summary table (Thelin, 1971, 91) shows [л] occurring not only in first pretonic position and absolute initial unaccented position but also in pretonic position after a prefix ending in a vowel, a position which may be