Reviews

Abstract

Linguistics 200, pp. 63-96. © Mouton Publishers, 1977. REVIEWS S. S. Vysotskij, M. V. Panov, A. A. Reformatskij and V. N. Sidorov (eds.), Razvitie fonetiki sovremennogo russkogo jazyka: Fonologiceskie podsistemy. Moskva, Izdatel'stvo "Nauka", 1971. 344 pp. This collection of papers, edited by four of the most notable Moscow phoneticians and linguists, is the second in the series on Russian phonetics put out by the Institute of the Russian Language of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.The opening paper, 0 moskovskoj fonologiceskoj skole, which forms the first of the book's seven sections, is a transcription of a tape-recording of an informal talk on the Moscow phonological school given by the late Prof. V. N. Sidorov to some younger members of the institute in June 1967. The publication of this paper is more than an act of pietas: essentially a fragment of scientific autobiography by one of the school's most original and influential thinkers, it is a welcome contribution to the primary sources on the history of linguistics in the USSR.The second section contains two papers. The first, O grammaticeskix faktorax razvitija foneticeskoj sistemy sovremennogo russkogo jazyka, examines the role of purely grammatical factors in the evolution of Russian pronunciation, for which the team of four authors, M. Ja. Glovinskaja, N. E. Il'ina, S. M. Kuz'mina, and M. V. Panov, finds considerable evidence in changes in the pronunciation of vowels, consonants, and loan words over the last fifty to sixty years. The second paper, O proiznosenii rabochix -urozencev g. Moskvy, by £. V. Ganiev, is a pioneering study of the pronunciation of factory workers. His investigation, carried out in 1965-7 at a Moscow iron-factory, used sixty speakers, fifty men and ten women, aged between seventeen and sixty-three, and representing a wide range of trades and jobs. The results reveal no correlation between a speaker's pronunciation and his trade or job. The main influence on it, Jhat of dialect, came either through his parents or as a result of prolonged residence, particularly in childhood, in the dialect's locality.The substantial third section, to which belong four papers, is devoted to certain peripheral, and therefore less studied, problems of contemporary Russian literary pronunciation. The first, Ob odnoj fonologiceskoj podsisteme Brought to you by |