Длительность горномарийских гласных как просодический фактор
Duration of Hill Mari Vowels as a Prosodic Factor

Summary/Abstract: It has been claimed that the Hill Mari stress is manifested by the vowel duration. The current study analyses the vowel duration in Hill Mari using experimental phonetic methods. The data from five native speakers of various ages were recorded in the village of Mikrjakovo in 2016-2017. In specially elaborated phonetic questionnaires, the token words of four disyllabic and seven trisyllabic structures were placed in the clause-middle and sentence-final positions. The relative durations of vowels are compared with a model where a reduced vowel is two times shorter than a full one. The analysis of the difference between the observed and predicted values shows that the model best fits the data from the oldest native speaker. The young speaker with the strongest influence of Russian demonstrates the greatest deviation from the model, most prominently in the prolongation of the penultimate vowel, which is usually considered as stressed. Basing on these results, we offer a hypothesis that the lengthening of the penultimate vowel as a manifestation of stress is a recent innovation, and there was probably no phonetically distinct stress in Hill Mari previously.

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