This paper analyzes the Russian noun stress pattern in terms of the phonology-morphology interface. For this purpose, I employ the framework of Optimality Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1995, Benua 1997) which enables the stress pattern to be better reanal...
This paper analyzes the Russian noun stress pattern in terms of the phonology-morphology interface. For this purpose, I employ the framework of Optimality Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1995, Benua 1997) which enables the stress pattern to be better reanalyzed in a synchronic way. In analyzing the Russian stress, several crucial constraints are proposed to reflect native-speaker intuition. Then I argue that the ranking of these constraints should *Lapse xxxx >> Ident-IO(stress) >> Weight-to-Stress-Principle >> NonFinality >> FootBinarity >> Align-Right >> Align-Left >> Iambic. I also show that this proposal enables us to describe the secondary stress pattern or stress shift in Russian in a more natural way. That is to say that they are a consequence of the rhythm constraint, *Lapse xxxx. This optimality analysis, therefore, can reduce the excessive load of the lexicon since it imposes a natural phonological analysis to numerous cases which have been regarded as morphological/lexical phenomena.