Congressus XI Internationalis Fenno-Ugristarum II. [antikvár]

Aasmae, Niina - Pajusalu, Karl - Zirnask, Tatiana Tartu VARIABILITY OF VOWEL DURATIONS IN ERZYA AND MOKSHA This paper will focus on the relationship between stress and the temporal characteristics of vowels in the Erzya- and Moksha-Mordvin languages. Recent reseach into the prosody of Erzya has revealed variability in the acoustic features of stress and quantity in the main dialect groups. The present paper compares empirical data obtained in an acoustic study of prosody in Erzya and Moksha. It is based on an analysis of di- and tri-syllabic words read in a frame sentence by native speakers. Analyses of data will include comparison of the duration ratios between vowels in the stressed and unstressed syllables. In the treatment of data, possible dependence of the vowel duration on several phonetic-phonological characteristics of the test words will be considered. Alongside with stress, such factors as, for example, syllable composition and morpheme boundaries can influence the duration ratio between the vowels within a word. One of the major research questions to be dealt with in the study is unstressed vowel reduction, which is a salient feature of the Moksha language and is characteristic of some dialects of Erzya. It is the aim of the study to establish patterns of the temporal relationship between the vowels of stressed and unstressed syllables in the main spoken varieties of Erzya and Moksha. Aasmae, Niina - Ross, Jaan Tartu THE METER OF ERZYA FOLK POETRY AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH THE LANGUAGE PROSODY In this paper an attempt will be made to approach the question of meter in Erzya folksongs by using empirical data on stress and quantity in language and verse. The major research questions to be treated are the acoustical manifestations of prosody and interaction between the prosodic features in language and folksongs. Erzya presents interest as a language with a mobile stress - its location is not fixed. The mobility of stress is not associated with a change in the lexical or grammatical meaning of a word (as, for example, in English or Russian, where stress is phonologically distinctive). Recent research has shown that in spontaneous and read speech the mobility of stress and the dependence of vowel quantity on stress are not uniform across the spoken varieties of Erzya. This paper will provide acoustical data on the temporal characteristics and formant structure of sounds, obtained by using the computer programme Praat, as well as an analysis of stress assignment in folksongs. The study will focus on dialect variation in the data.