Erzya Prosody (review)

Erzya (also called Erzya-Mordvin), together with Moksha, forms the Mordvin subgroup of the Finno-Ugric languages, spoken by about 1.1 million speakers in Central Russia (map in Appendix 1, 92). Among other things, Erzya is exceptional within Finno-Ugric in that it possesses the smallest vowel inventory (five phonemes), allegedly with no quantity or tone opposition, and in that unfixed word stress has been claimed for it. Placement of stress is not contrastive, either morphologically or lexically. Rather, word-level stress in Erzya appears to be a manifestation of sentence stress with a tendency toward a rhythmic pattern of disyllabic feet. In contrast to this, Moksha, the closest relative of Erzya, has a fixed expiratory accent with concomitant reduction of unstressed vowels.

The book is made up of two main sections. The first part (Ch. 2, 13–47) gives a survey of previous diachronic and typological research on the questions of stress, quantity, and tone in Erzya and Proto-Mordvin. Since most of earlier scholarship focused on stress and tended to be rather impressionistic, the authors set themselves the task of producing an acoustic-phonetic description of the language as a starting point for further comparisons with better studied systems in Finno-Ugric. Therefore in the second part of the book (Ch. 3, 48–83), they present the results of their experimental research of Erzya’s prosodic features. The investigation concentrates on the possible existence of contrastive duration and on the role of stress in Erzya prosody. The basis of the acoustic analysis was a set of 104 test words of one to six syllables, the majority being disyllabic (list in Appendix 2, 93–95). Each word occurred in two different sentence positions, phrase-final and sentence-final. The test material did not contain incon testable minimal pairs for any of the prosodic features. The duration of sounds, the acoustic structure of vowels, and their fundamental frequency were measured. Due to technical restrictions, intensity was not studied. The data were taken from eight Erzya speakers from a uniform dialectal background, all students or university teachers, most of whom spent considerable time outside the Erzya-speaking area. Presumably none of the informants are true or near monoglots. Numerous tables and figures present the analyzed material in a clear and easily accessible way. The raw data follow in Appendix 3 (96–127); a statistical analysis of variance (ANOVA) has been implemented in Appendix 4 (128–37).

Generally speaking, the studied words appear to carry a primary stress on the first syllable. In view of the alleged rhythmical accentuation of Erzya, however, this uniform behavior may be ascribed to the rhythmical pattern superimposed by the frame sentence ‘I said X, not Y’. Follow-up research with differently structured frame sentences is desirable to determine if the position of word stress can indeed vary, not only within the dialects of Erzya, but even with one and the same speaker, as previous scholars have claimed. In the studied material, stress played neither a contrastive nor an identificational role. No phonologically relevant quantity opposition in vowels and consonants and no contrastive use of intonation could be established. Duration and pitch might therefore be expected to offer themselves as phonetic indicators of stress. But the results are ambiguous. Even though a correlation of gradual vowel reduction with unstressedness is observable, against expectations the duration of stressed first syllables in polysyllabic words was frequently shorter than that of syllables with a secondary stress. As a consequence, a trained phonetician using duration as a cue for stressedness perceived trisyllabic words to be accented on the second syllable, whereas a native speaker ignored the latter’s durational prominence and identified the first syllable as stressed.

In conclusion, this book is suitable for both students and advanced scholars of experimental phonetics and of Finno-Ugric linguistics. As the authors...