Phonetics and Phonology in Russian Unstressed Vowel Reduction: A Study in Hyperarticulation

Unstressed vowel reduction figures centrally in recent literature on the phonetics-phonology interface, in part owing to the possibility of a causal relationship between a phonetic process, duration-dependent undershoot, and the phonological neutralizations observed in systems of unstressed vocalism. Of particular interest in this light has been Russian, traditionally described as exhibiting two distinct phonological reduction patterns, differing both in degree and distribution. This study uses hyperarticulation to investigate the relationship between phonetic duration and reduction in Russian, concluding that these two reduction patterns differ not in degree, but in the level of representation at which they apply. These results are shown to have important consequences not just for theories of vowel reduction, but for other problems in the phonetics-phonology interface as well, incomplete neutralization in particular.