Vowel reduction in Russian homonymic clitics as a means of functional differentiation.

Russian clitics are known to belong to several parts of speech, both major and minor, such as particles, prepositions, conjunctions and pronouns. More than that, many Russian particle and conjunction clitics derive from adverbs and pronouns. That creates pairs and sets of homonymic unstressed words belonging to different functional classes. While one might expect clitics to follow word- internal phonological rules, Russian clitics demonstrate variation, including in qualitative vowel reduction. In this work, the link between word class and vowel phonology in Russian clitics was investigated. An experiment was designed, during which 30 native Russian speakers were asked to read out loud a set of unrelated sentences containing clitic groups. The contexts were designed to illustrate different environmental variables. Qualitative vowel reduction was analysed in over 4000 tokens. The results demonstrate several qualitative reduction patterns reflecting functional differences, as well as similarities, between homonyms of different classes. Due to functional variations inside the word classes it seems impossible to detect a clear correlation between a vowel reduction pattern and a word class. However, a sharp contrast between major and minor word classes was observed. More than that, phonological appearance of the clitics actually revealed threshold grammatical phenomena and reflected functional changes in sets of homonymic clitics through a smooth change in variation rate.