NOMINAL ACCENTUATION IN CONTEMPORARY STANDARD RUSSIAN

1. It has become customary to derive the accentuation of a word form from inherent accent-generating properties of its con-stituent morphemes. Thouqh this seems to be a suitable technique in the case of languages with inherent tonal features, such as African lanquages or Common Slavic, one may wonder if it is equally appropriate for a language like Russian, where accent is a configurational feature. In the words ~ y n a 'torment ' and M Y K ~ 'flour', the stress on the first vowel conditions the absence of stress on the second, and vice versa: there is no opposition with two or zero accents. Thus, stressed and unstressed u are not different phonemes because they are not found in one and the Same position; phonemic stress is a property of the sequence. It is by no means clear that the descriptive technique which as-siqns inherent accentual properties to the separate morphemes and eliminates the resultinq overspecification by rule shoul