Zvonísh' or Zvónish' - Deviation or a New Standard?
The article deals with the problem of accentuation in the verbs ending with “-it’”. These verbs are believed to be a good litmus test when determining a degree to which a person masters the culture of oral speech. To this day the problem remains to be one of the most pressing issues of contemporary accentology. Comparative analysis of various contemporary pronouncing dictionaries indicates that pronouncing recommendations differ greatly from each other in many aspects. Sometimes they are even in contradiction. Discrepancies found in the dictionaries as well as numerous deviations from the prescribed accentuation standards justified launching a sociolinguistic experiment. As its results indicate, the majority of respondents (64 %), regardless of their age, choose the variant with flexible stress. This proves that the verbs ending with “-it’” are changing its accentuation type to another more productive one. The fact that 36 % of respondents chose the fixed stress variant shows that the process of substituting the fixed stress for the unfixed one is running in different words at a different time and pace.