Russian assimilatory palatalization is incomplete neutralization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Incomplete neutralization refers to phonetic traces of underlying contrasts in phonologically neutralizing contexts. The present study examines one such context: Russian assimilatory palatalization in C+j sequences. Russian contrasts plain and palatalized consonants, (e.g., /p/ vs. /pj/ with the “plain” consonants having a secondary articulation, involving retraction of the tongue dorsum (velarization/uvularization)). However, in the C+j sequences (e.g., /pjot/ ‘drink (3ps pres)’) the contrast between palatalized and plain consonants is neutralized, due to the palatalization of the plain consonants: /pjot/ → [pʲjot] (assimilatory palatalization). The purpose of the study is to explore whether the neutralization is complete. To do so, we conducted an electromagnetic articulography (EMA) experiment examining temporal coordination and the spatial position of the tongue body in underlyingly palatalized consonants and those derived from assimilatory palatalization. Articulatory results from four native speakers of Russian revealed that gestures in both conditions are coordinated as complex segments (i.e., they are palatalized consonants); however, there are differences across conditions consistent with the residual presence of a tongue dorsum retraction gesture in the “plain” obstruents. We conclude that neutralization of the plain-palatal contrast in Russian is incomplete—consonants in the assimilatory palatalization condition exhibit inter-gestural coordination characteristic of palatalized consonants along with residual evidence of an underlying tongue dorsum retraction (velarization/uvularization) gesture.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".