Interface constraints and frequency in Russian compound stress

This paper has two goals. The first is to describe the patterns of secondary stress assignment in Russian compounds. Russian lexical stress is famously complex, and secondary stress in compounds re-veals previously unnoticed properties of the system. An understand-ing of compound stress may resolve some debates in the analyses of Russian stress. Our second goal is to contribute to the study of how frequency interacts with phonological markedness. There is an oft-noted correlation between high frequency and relative phonological unmarkedness (Martin 2007, Zipf 1949, and others). Russian presents a correlation of a different variety: phonological markedness signals morphological complexity. Specifically, secondary stress, which is an anomalous feature for Russian words, is more likely to occur on low-frequency words, and we argue that its placement encodes morpho-logical complexity. Low frequency requires a more robust indication of morphological complexity. We analyze the interaction between frequency and morphological complexity in Russian compound stress in terms of constraint indexation in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 2004). An analysis of Russian requires that indexation be available for morphological interface constraints, not just for faith