Pronounciation subsystems in Standard Russian: Problems of identification

 It is generally acknowledged that the phonetic patterns of the Russian literary language are not universal and do not cover the entire vocabulary. Groups of words distinguished for various reasons, in many cases, do not obey the general rules of the sound system, but rather specific patterns that set these groups against both the system as a whole and each other. Traditionally, such groups of words are called pronunciational subsystems and are distinguished based on their lexical, grammatical, and statistical features (subsystem of loanwords, service words, rare words, etc.). The article attempts a description of the pronunciational subsystems of the Russian literary language based on purely phonetic criteria. In the proposed model, all the facts of the sound system of the Russian literary language are grouped into two subsystems — phonetic (there is a synchronous phonetic law that is not “tied” to specific words or morphemes, the realization of a phoneme in a certain phonetic position unambiguously predicts the appearance of a specific sound) and orthoepic (combines various cases of orthoepic variation, which are given in a list and do not allow to determine pronunciation of words or morphemes based on their spelling). Phonetic patterns are universal, they work in any words and morphemes. Orthoepic phenomena can be divided, depending on lexical or grammatical indicators, into groups of words and parts of words united by common pronounciation features — loan words, function words, proper names, the first bases of compounds and abbreviated compounds, etc. In contrast to the traditional approach, these groups of words are not recognized in the proposed model as pronouncing subsystems.