On the Presentation of Russian Stress

Although Russian stress patterns appear complicated, it is clear that a unified, coherent pedagogical treatment of stress among all Russian inflected words is possible, & a first attempt is made at elaborating such a comprehensive system. Starting from a stress notational system similar to that found in the single stem treatment of the V in C. E. Townsend's Continuing with Russian (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), parallels are drawn between verbal stress patterns & stress behavior of Russian Ns & adjs. It is also shown how expanded interpretive conventions will allow just three diacritic marks over vocabulary listings to represent the various stress phenomena found. In choosing the abstract representations for these vocabulary citation forms, significantly, the analysis demonstrates that for virtually all Vs & adjs, & for over 99% of Russian Ns, a properly marked single stem provides all the necessary information to enable students to produce correct complete paradigms. AA