On some factors affecting the choice of tune in Russian wh-questions

The results of a production experiment that investigated prosodic variability in Russian information-seeking wh-questions are reported. Three wh-questions in four focus conditions, with and without initial particle ?, were elicited in a reading task from 20 native speakers of Russian. The data generally corroborate prior descriptions and demonstrate that a large inventory of tunes is used by Russian speakers in wh-questions. Namely, several patterns with one or two “falling” pitch accents (downstepped and non-downstepped) can be recognized in the data, as well as one “rising” pattern containing a high edge tone. Preliminary phonological analysis is proposed for these tunes. The effects of two factors on the choice of the “nuclear pitch accent + edge tone” configuration (“falling” H*+L L-% vs. “rising” L* H-%) were tested statistically. The results demonstrate that contrastive focus condition restricts the use of the “rising” pattern while the presence of phrase-initial particle ? has an opposite, but weaker effect on the choice of tune.