Olympiad oral round: stress variants under time pressure
At a regional olympiad, a jury prepares a 10-item oral round. The list includes: звони́т, краси́вее, обеспе́чение, догово́р, каталог, жалюзи́, то́рты, ба́нты, свёкла, щаве́ль. Two contestants stress краси́вее as красиве́е and звони́т as зво́нит. The jury must decide whether to accept the variants and write a short rationale for each. A constraint: each rationale must name syllable structure, morphological analogy, or borrowed-word stress, not just «dictionary says so». The jury also wants one general principle that explains the largest number of items in the list and flags at least one exception that needs lexical marking. They have 15 minutes and a three-sentence limit per item.
1. Which stress variants in the list are normative, and how should the jury rule on the two contested forms? Give the reasoning pattern for each contested form.
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Normative stress: звони́т, краси́вее, обеспе́чение, догово́р, каталог, жалюзи́, то́рты, ба́нты, свёкла, щаве́ль. The contested forms красиве́е and зво́нит are nonnormative in the literary standard.
- звони́т: the verb звонить belongs to the -ить conjugation and keeps final stress in present forms; the form зво́нит would require a stem-stressed pattern not supported by related forms.
- краси́вее: the comparative suffix -ее is added to краси́в-, and stress stays on the -и́в- syllable, as in краси́вый; shifting it to -ве́е breaks the derivational pattern.
The jury should not treat the variants as equal. It may note their colloquial status, but the oral round tests the literary norm, so the variants should be marked incorrect with the structural reason attached.
2. Formulate one general principle covering the largest subset and identify one item that must be lexically marked as an exception.
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A workable principle is stem-stress stability in native and early-borrowed nouns: if a noun has stress on the stem in its basic form, the plural or related form tends to keep stress on that same stem syllable. This covers то́рты, ба́нты and helps explain why the stressed vowel does not move to the ending.
The principle is not universal. жалюзи́ must be marked lexically: it is an indeclinable borrowing with final stress, and no productive Russian noun pattern predicts that stress reliably. The jury should present the principle as a tendency with exceptions, not as a law, and require lexical marking for жалюзи́.