Janina Mołczanow. Interactions of vowel quality and prosody in East Slavic. Sheffield, UK: Equinox Publishing Ltd, 2022. 216 pp. [Series: Advances in Optimality Theory.] ISBN-13 (Hardback) 9781800502345, ISBN (eBook) 9781800502352.

Abstract

Janina Mołczanow’s book Interactions of vowel quality and prosody in East Slavic develops an account of vowel reduction in East Slavic languages, such as standard Belarusian and standard Russian, as well as many dialects that exhibit many different patterns of vowel reduction. Vowel reduction in East Slavic is extremely complex. Traditionally one distinguishes moderate reduction, which applies in the syllable immediately preceding the stressed one (called “first pretonic” or just “pretonic” in the Slavic literature), and extreme reduction, which applies to vowels in other unstressed syllables in a word. While Mołczanow adopts an existing account of extreme reduction, she proposes a novel treatment of moderate reduction. The claim of the book is that all the different patterns of moderate vowel reduction attested in East Slavic can be unified because all vowel alternations that are the result of this type of reduction are due to the presence of High tone in the head foot.