Intonacija častnogo voprosa v russkom jazyke: èksperimentalʹnoe issledovanie istočnikov variativnosti (Russian wh-question intonation: experimental data on some sources of variation)

The paper presents the results of an experimental study of prosody in Russian whquestions. The data were elicited by means of a dialogue reading task performed by 20 native speakers of Standard Russian. The results generally corroborate existing reports on the variability of pitch contours, making it possible to determine the basic types of tonal configurations and propose a preliminary phonological interpretation for these contours within the Autosegmental metrical model of intonation. Four different configurations of accents were found in the data: on the one hand, three “falling” contours containing a low edge tone preceded by different combinations of prenuclear accents; on the other hand, a single “rising” contour containing a high edge tone. In addition, effects of two factors on the choice of question tune were tested: focus type and presence of phrase-initial particle. Both effects were found to be significant. While contrastive focus restricted the use of the high edge tone configuration (to a varying extent, depending on the syntactic role of the word in focus), the rising tune was more likely to be chosen in the presence of the particle.