Current trends in the pronunciation of consonant groups

The study addresses the pronunciation of consonant groups in the modern Russian literary language using the example of the combinations -nkt- and -rks-. The relevance of this work is that it is important for the subsequent codification of the orthoepic norm for the pronunciation of consonant combinations of the modern Russian literary language. The novelty of the research is determined by the “factorial” approach: the author uses experimental data to identify the factors affecting the distribution of variants in simplifying the groups of consonants -nkt- and -rks-. The research methodology comprises not only general scientific methods, such as factor analysis and comparison of linguistic units, but also experimental ones, including a phonetic experiment, the data of which were processed with the help of the Praat program. When designing the experiment, linguistic and sociolinguistic factors were taken into account: strong and weak prosodic position of the word, morphemic composition of words, frequency of word usage, attribution of words to professional or everyday vocabulary, word length, age of respondents, and specific communicative situation. The aim of the study was to establish a correlation between the pronunciation features of the given consonant combinations and the factors influencing it. The data obtained as a result of the experiment were compared with the pronunciation of the studied consonant combinations in live spontaneous speech and in the media. The results of the experiment, when compared with the codification of the norm for the pronunciation of consonant groups in the orthoepic dictionaries of the Russian language, showed that the norm needs to be supplemented and clarified, since its codification requires a targeted “pinpoint” approach and in some cases a word-by-word description.