ORTHOEPIC NORMS ARE NOT A DOGMA, BUT A LIVING SYSTEM

Abstract

According to L. A. Verbitskaya, the norm is “a set of phenomena allowed by the language system, selected and fixed in the speech of native speakers and mandatory for all who speak the literary language at a certain period of time”. The norm is static, it makes the literary language understandable for everyone and at any time. Researchers, however, noticed that the norm is a constant only with a great deal of convention. The codified norm is opposed by the real “norm–usus”, which is well understood by native speakers, but hasn’t been recorded almost anywhere. A good exception are the reduced forms (RF) of Russian super–frequency words. According to the compilers, RF is not just speech errors of people in a hurry, but the result of the evolutionary development of the language. Many of them can already be qualified as the norm of colloquial speech. The dictionary contains the most complete information about each form: from the written appearance of the original unit to real transcription based on auditory and instrumental analysis of contexts from the corpus of Russian everyday speech. This dictionary has a specific potential user: teachers of Russian as a foreign language (RFL) and foreign students. They hear these forms in our speech, see them in written texts — in the speech of literary characters — and don’t know how to use them and even often — how to understand them. The dictionary offers a compact list of such forms (100 units), with examples, simplified transcription and frequency lists, which makes it virtually a ready–made manual for RFL. Refs 22.