The book contains two main parts. In the first part (Chapter 2), previous studies of the prosody of Erzya are surveyed. The chapter focuses on earlier acoustic analyses of Erzya prosodic features, treatments of Erzya phonology, and diachronic and typological studies of Mordvin in general and Erzya in particular. The objective of this review is to bring forward research questions relevant to solving the puzzle of Erzya prosody. The second main part of the study (Chapter 3) presents the results of the experimental research. The analysis concentrates on the role of quantity and stress in the Erzya prosodic system. The duration of sounds, the acoustical structure of vowels, and the fundamental frequency are measured in a corpus of test sentences.

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