Abstract: | The article aims at the explanation of some distributional peculiarities of two high
unrounded vowels [i] and [È] in Russian. More generally, it looks at some phonotactic
constraints of Russian vowels which are directly related to a broader topic of
palatalization and vowel reduction in this language. Although the discussion in this
paper concerns only a tiny section of Russian phonology, which is the distribution of
high unrounded vowels, it is necessary to introduce several facts from Russian
phonology, such as palatalization, velarization, stress and vowel reduction. They, at
first sight, may look pretty much irrelevant to the main topic of the paper but, as it
will become evident, are closely related and actually indispensable to the
understanding of vowel distribution including the two high unrounded vowels in
Russian. |