Russian elision as lenition to zero

Abstract

While there has been extensive documentation of elision in colloquial Russian speech, there is minimal phonetic research on its underlying causes. The present study performs an exploratory acoustic analysis on spontaneous Russian speech and ties its phonetic correlates to previously described lenition processes by demonstrating their continuous nature. Special attention is given to /v/ due to its sonorant-like qualities in Russian. Furthermore, the study uses the results of this analysis to propose a framework for predicting elided forms using both language-general processes alongside word frequency.