The influence of boundary depth on phrase-final lengthening in Russian

Abstract

As shown for many languages, words are lengthened at ends of major prosodic boundaries, and the lengthening effect is most prominent at ends of intonational phrases and utterances. However, it is not clear whether the deeper boundary—end of utterance—shows more lengthening than the other one—end of intonational phrase. The present paper is aimed at answering this question by analysing the duration of Russian stressed and post-stressed vowels in open and closed syllables in words immediately preceding prosodic boundaries; the study is based on corpus data. The results show that for most speakers boundary depth only affects the lengthening of absolute-final vowels, either stressed or post-stressed; vowels in closed or penultimate syllables show similar lengthening effect for both types of boundaries. Additionally, our data show that in Russian stressed vowels are the main carriers of final lengthening, compared to post-stressed vowels.