The phonology of boundaries and secondary stress in Russian compounds

Abstract

In Russian, the phonological diagnostics for prosodic words conflict when applied to compounds. On the one hand, compounds can have multiple stresses (oboròn-o-sposóbnost' ‘defense-linker-capability’), whereas single-root words can only have a single stress. On the other hand, non-stress rules such as word-final devoicing and vowel reduction treat compounds as single prosodic words. Based on this and other kinds of evidence, I demonstrate that compounds are indeed single prosodic words, though they are required to have a stress for each sub-stem. Secondary stress patterns in compounds also provide some clues as to the location of default stress in what is an almost entirely lexical stress system.