Распределение фонем в татарском тексте: опыт квантитативного исследования
Phoneme distribution in a Tatar text: a quantitative approach

Summary/Abstract: Along with the qualitative description of phonemes which is presented in Tatar grammars, their quantitative description is often required. Such a research should be performed on a sufficient volume of text data which would contain lexical items in their natural surroundings and reflect basic regularities of the language system. This paper analyzes the distribution of phonemes and phoneme combinations in the story by Amirkhan Yeniki “Äytelmägän vasɪyät” (“The unspoken testament”). The research material was the text converted to a phonologically relevant form. The absolute and relative frequencies (using the quantiles of the standard normal distribution) are provided for each of the 34 phonemes distinguished in the text. The approach to data normalization (z-statistics) is based on information about both the number of phonemes depending on their position (wordinitial, wordfinal or wordmedial), and the total number of occurrences of each phoneme in the text; this allows us to retain information about positional features of low frequency phonemes and to find individual tendencies for each cell in the contingency table. The deviation of the z-statistics from the quantiles of the standard normal distribution (-1.96, 1.96) indicates the character of phoneme sequences in the language. It is shown that for the absolute majority of Tatar phonemes, the z-statistics are far beyond the interval (-1.96, 1.96), with the exception of borrowed phonemes |ц| and |щ|, as well as the low-frequency phoneme |ж|, which indicates the random nature of the distribution of these phonemes in Tatar. The syntagmatic component of the phonological system, just like the inventory of phonemes, is unique for each language, so without such study the phonological description would be incomplete. That is why a special section examines Tatar phoneme sequences using the example of two and three phoneme combinations. Since there is often a gap in grammar books between the descriptions of the phonological and morphological levels, quantitative information on phonemes is complemented with grammatical interpretation; in particular, the author shows that high frequency combinations of phonemes are associated with affixes and stems, which is determined by the agglutinative structure of the Tatar language.

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