Variation and Frequency in Russian Word Stress

An important and complex area of stress in Russian, which has to date received insufficient attention, is variation in stress. By variation in stress is meant the possibility of two (or more, in theory, but rarely in practice) syllables on which the stress may fall in a given word form. Thus, for example, the plural short form of the adjective верный ‘faithful’ is given in standard sources as either вeрны or верны. We should underline that in essence we are talking about ‘word form’ here, since variation may occur in one or more inflected forms of a word, but not throughout the entire paradigm (e.g. dat. pl. of вода, водам or водам, but only вода nom. sg., воду acc. sg). In other cases, a word might be characterized by stress variation in all its forms depending on whether one is using one or other of the base forms, e.g. творог or творог ‘cottage cheese’. Thus, the former ‘base form’ results in all inflected forms having fixed stem stress (e.g. gen. sg. творога), and the latter in all forms having ending stress (e.g. gen. sg. творога ). Stress variation, to a greater or lesser extent, exists in all the Slavic languages in which stress is not determined solely on a purely syllabic basis (e.g. Czech, Slovak and Polish); thus, for example, Ukrainian displays extensive stress variation in the infinitives of verbs (see Clarke, 2004, 32).