Rõhk ja kestus mokša keele Kesk-Vadi murdes

Abstract

In Moksha, methods of experimental phonetics have not been systematically used to study prosody. Fragmentary data available on stress, which were based on durational measurements in Mid-Vad, show that duration might be an important stress correlate. This article treats the relationship between stress and duration in Mid-Vad by using sets of measurement data. It focuses on vowel durations measured in mono-, di-, and trisyllabic words of different structure, which were read in a frame sentence by two speakers. Vowel durations were found to depend on stress – vowels in stressed syllables were longer than in unstressed syllables. Variation was related to word structure – e.g. high vowels (having lower intrinsic duration than low and mid vowels) under stress were as long as unstressed low and mid vowels. The results are useful for the development of prosody research in Moksha