A Computational Phonology of Russian

This dissertation provides a coherent synchronic broad-coverage generative phonology of Russian. I test the grammar empirically in a number of ways to determine its goodness of fit to Russian. In taking this approach I aim to avoid making untested (or even incoherent) generalizations based on only a handful of examples. In most cases the tests show that there are exceptions to the theory but at least we know what the exceptions are a baseline is set against which future theories can be measured and in most cases the percentage of exceptional cases is reduced to below 5%. The principal theoretical outcomes of the work are as follows. First I show that all of the phonological or morphophonological processes reviewed can be described by a grammar no more powerful than context-free. Secondly I exploit probabilistic constraints in the syllable structure grammar to explain why constraints on word-marginal onsets and codas are weaker than on word-internal onsets and codas. I argue that the features [+/- initial] and [+/- final] and extraprosodicity are unnecessary for this purpose.