Rhythmic stress in Ukrainian: Acoustic evidence of a bidirectional system

Abstract

Bidirectional stress systems with internal lapses are rare and their existence has been recently called into question (Newlin-Łukowicz 2012). The present paper reports an acoustic study of secondary stress in Ukrainian based on polysyllabic words with lexical stress located at or near the right edge of the word. The results indicate that Ukrainian has an iteration of secondary stresses from the left edge towards the lexical stress, rather than in the opposite direction. This characteristic makes it metrically related to bidirectional stress systems with internal lapses (e.g. Polish), which invalidates the argument against such systems and proves the empirical adequacy of the metrical theories designed to account for these stress patterns.

An Acoustic Study of Vowel Undershoot in a System with Several Degrees of Prominence

“…Previous research has demonstrated that increased duration cues rhythmic stress in Ukrainian ( [10], [11], [14]). However, these studies concentrated on duration, intensity and pitch and did not investigate vowel quality as a potential variable contributing to the expression of rhythmic prominence.…”

“…[8], [9]). The current study investigates vowel undershoot in Ukrainian, a language exhibiting several degrees of lengthening within one word ( [10], [11], [12]). These durational differences render Ukrainian a perfect testing ground for the theories of phonetic reduction as a durationdependent undershoot.…”

“…Ukrainian has contrastive lexical stress. According to standard descriptive sources as well as recent phonetic studies ( [10], [11], [12], [13]), lexically stressed syllables are much longer than unstressed syllables; according to [10], [11] -by a factor of 1.5. In addition, vowels in Ukrainian are lengthened in pretonic positions (i.e.…”

“…In addition, vowels in Ukrainian are lengthened in pretonic positions (i.e. positions immediately preceding lexical stress), and in positions of rhythmic stress (secondary stress occurring in every second syllable, but blocked by the vicinity of lexical stress; [11], [14]). (We use here the terminology commonly adopted in the literature on Slavic prosody, e.g.…”

“…unstressed) syllables (σ 2 ). It should be noted that despite similar duration, pretonic lengthening and rhythmic stress are phonologically different phenomena -the former is associated with the primary (lexical) stress, while the latter is conditioned by the grammatical (rhythmic) stress (see [11] for discussion).…”