Alter, Kai & Uwe Junghanns: Topic-Related Prosodic Patterns in Russian

To appear in the proceedings of FDSL-2.

The following sentences were included in the test:

I. Subject internal topics

II. Object internal topics

III. External topics

IV. "Doubled" XPs ("reduplication")

V. Filler sentences (adverbial internal topics)

VI. "Doubled" XPs / McCoy's (1997) orthography

The test persons received the sentences in written form. The order was pseudo-randomized. Any clue as to what would be tested was eliminated.

The test persons were asked to read the sentences aloud. For the first set of sentences (those referred to by small letters) the speakers were not told how to read so as to obtain results as natural as possible. Then the test persons got the task to read a subset of the sentences (those referred to by capital letters) "podobno oratoru" (i.e., as if making a (solemn) speech); to trigger - at least in some cases - the intonation mentioned in Sirotinina (1974).

We recorded the sentences, digitalized the speech signals and analyzed them. Two parameters were of special interest: (i) fundamental frequency (F0) and (ii) time structure.

We obtained three major results. First, the different types of topics in Russian do not realize different F0 patterns. There is always a rise+fall of the fundamental frequency in the initial part of the sentence. Second, the major syntactic distinction of external vs. internal topics correlates to pause insertion after the topic vs. its integration into the global declination of the sentence. Third, there is no prosodic evidence for a distinction between external topics and allegedly reduplicated XPs (so-called doubling, cf. McCoy (1997)).

References

Sirotinina, O.B. (1974): Konstrukcii s pleonasticeskim mestoimeniem v razgovornoj reci. In: Zolotova, G.A. (otv. red.): Sintaksis i norma. Moskva: Nauka, 204-219.