Active processes in the prosodic system of the Russian language: Accentuation of past tense verbs

The article is devoted to the accentuation of the past-tense forms of non-reflexive and reflexive
verbs of the unproductive class in Russian. Based on the comparison of stress variants
codified by modern orthoepic dictionaries and the data obtained in a series of experiments that
reflect the actual pronunciation used by speakers of Modern Standard Russian, the causes of
changes occurring in the accent paradigm of non-reflexive verbs of the past tense are analyzed
and the problems of codification of norms in the orthoepic dictionaries are raised.
The majority of non-reflexive verbs studied in the experiments are characterized by the
formation of an accentual opposition of the singular and plural forms: in the feminine and
neuter singular, the stress falls on the inflection, in the plural, on the stem. In particular, this
trend results in the complete absence of stressed ending bias in the plural forms of the verbs
under discussion. It is not only absent in the colloquial usage of native speakers of Standard
Russian, but also in the Moscow vernacular, while singular neuter forms with stress on the
ending are widely distributed and are gradually becoming the main accentual variants.
In reflexive verbs, in general, the same tendency to contrast singular and plural forms is
observed: shift of stress to the stem is more common in plural forms than in singular neuter
forms.