Morphophonemics and the Rule of Intensity Attraction

January 23, 2010

Morphophonemics and the Rule of Intensity Attraction

I am going to try explaining Jakobson’s famous article of 1948, which remains perhaps the single most influential study on the formal description of verbal morphology of all time, prefiguring Chomsky’s “Sound Pattern of English” and many others. Scholars have spent their lives working out the ramifications of Jakobson’s truly visionary 13-page sketch.
So in simple terms, or as simple as I can make them, for you who have learned a few, or maybe more than a few, Russian verbs and how they work.

First, morphophonemic transcriptions. This is the alphabet of the deep (abstract) base form of verbs. One abstract base form per verb. Choose as your basic form, Jakobson says, the one which may occur in the environment where the other one, too, may occur. What? Let me quote that precisely.

“We take as basic the alternate which appears in a position where the other alternate too would be permissible.” Take Russian я смотрЮ, pronounced smatr’—U and ты смОтришь, pronounced smOtr’—iš. (I write all stressed vowels as capitals). These are phonemic transcriptions, where we see that the vowel ‘o’ occurs under stress, while the vowel ‘a’ occurs outside of stress. Now, we choose the variant smOtr’— as basic because we could, conceivably, have a phonemic word smAtr’—, but we couldn’t have a phonemic smotr—U, because ‘o’ always reduces to ‘a’ outside of stress. That helps us pick the morphophonemic base: the one with ‘o’, even if ‘a’ occurs in most of the present tense forms.

A more complex example is the Russian word печь, ‘bake’, conjugated пекУ печёшь печёт печём печёте пекУт, past tense пёк пеклА пеклО пеклИ, infinitive печь. Now the phonemic transcription mirrors the softening of consonants and reduction of vowels: p’ik—U, p’ič—O-š, p’ič—Ot, p’ok—#, p’ik—l-A. Study these carefully. Soft ‘p’before the vowels. ‘e’ reduces to ‘i’ outside of stress. Past masculine has ‘o’, the other pasts ‘i’. What should be the basic form here? Here again we look for the stressed position. Now, ‘o’ is not admitted between two soft consonants, in normal standard Russian, so the infinitive is forced to печь , where both the p’ and č are soft (we don’t write č’to indicate softness, because č is always and everywhere soft). But both ‘o’ and ‘e’ can occur after a soft consonant and before a hard, as пёк ‘he baked’, and сек ‘he chopped’. So the basic morphophonemic form is p’ok—, unstressed. This, even though the vowel ‘o’ only actually occurs in the masculine past; that’s because it is forced out by the environment in all the others. We look at the phonemic shapes to see how the pronounciation will be, but we look to the morphophonemic shapes to see the underlying base.

So you are actually learning morphophonemics and phonemics when reading the first few pages of this article. Just another example or two. Take the verb лежАть ‘to be lying’, я лежУ ты лежИшь он лежИт они лежАт, лежAл, лежAла, gerund (with the meaning ‘lying, recumbent’ лёжа. Here are some phonemic shapes: l’iž—A-t’, l’iž—U, l’iž—I-š, l’Oža. Again the base form will be l’ož—a; ‘o’ is turns to ‘i’ unstressed after soft.

One more example: ‘to drink’, пить, пью пьёшь пьёт пьём пьёте пьют, пил, пилА, пили, imperative пей. In this verb we see an example of a situation that comes up frequently in the Russian verb: there seems to be one stem for the infinitive and past tense, and another for the present. Indeed, if we take the non-syllabic p’j— as the base (the present stem) we add the vocalic endings, and for the nonpresent forms, there has to be a vowel inserted, with which ‘j’ will alternate — ‘i’. Compare, for a very productive category, the present stems d’elaj—, pon’imaj— with the past stems dela—, pon’ima—. Here we see that a resonant (j), or potentially any consonant, will be truncated before another consonant — that is, any nonpresent ending. VC and CV are permitted across the boundary from stem to full form, but VV and CC are not.

In this way Jakobson turns the question “one stem or two” into a deeper observation about the behavior of morphophonemes when in contact with each other.

Wait a minute, how do we get the imperative пей? Why isn’t that the basic stem? Well, because the ‘e’ would have to be deleted in every other form, or changed to ‘i’. Better to assume that the imperative has an inserted ‘e’, since, of course, a word cannot be nonsyllabic in Russian verbs, so p’j— inserts the vowel but keeps the ‘j’ before zero. The ending of the imperative will be zero, as it is unless the ending is stressed.

If unstressed, the present tense endings begin with a high vowel, ‘u’ for 3rd person and ‘i’ for the others. This is called the rule of intensity attraction. The diffuse (high, or close) vowels i, u appear when the endings are unstressed, or of weaker intensity. Thus плАчут, плАчешь, плАчет, пИшешь пИшут, вИжу вИдишь, вИдют [this is older Moscow pronunciation for a present-day mid central vowel]. Note that e and и boil down to the same phoneme here, ‘i’, because if the e is unstressed (weak), it goes up to the diffuse, or weaker, high vowel, and the third pl ending я, if unstressed, in older Moscow norm went to у. (But not any more, which seems to vitiate the rule.)

More later. That wasn’t so bad, was it?