Some accentological features of modern southern Russian dialects

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of word stress in southern Russian dialects. The object of the study is dialectal texts recorded in the territory of the southern Russian dialects and representing all groups of dialects of this dialect association. As an introduction to the main part of the study an overview of the main principles of the Old Russian accentual system is given and the directions of its further development are briefly outlined. The essential attention is paid to the accentological behavior of nouns and verbs in modern Russian dialects. The main conclusions of the study are as follows: 1) there are accentological features that distinguish the dialects of two southern Russian zones: the central and easten ones; 2) in the southern Russian dialects there are archaisms and innovations concerning feminine nouns that originally belonged to the accentual paradigm a; 3) in one of the dialects of the Tula group of the southern Russian dialects, feminine nouns of the *-ā declension, belonging to different accentual paradigms, develop the same correlation in the place of stress of the nominative and accusative cases in the singular; 4) masculine nouns with a monosyllabic base of all accentual paradigms have some differences in the southern Russian dialects from the modern Russian literary language; 5) there are dialectal differences associated with the accentuation of the present tense forms of the verb to go and the simple future tense forms of the prefixal derivatives of this verb; 6) there is a number of class IV verbs with an infinitive stem on suffixes -i- and -ě-, which, unlike the literary language, have not changed the accentual paradigm in the present. Thus, accentual archaisms and innovations in southern Russian dialects do not always coincide with accentual archaisms and innovations of the literary language.