Andrei Munteanu
email: andrei.munteanu2 at mcgill.ca
office (2025 W): 1085 Dr. Penfield, #322
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Intonation Countours in Russian be Sentence Type
Abstract
We present a production study where participants pronounced information-seeking questions (ISQs), confirmative (CDQs) and surprise declarative questions (SDQs), and assertions in Russian. A principal component analysis (on the pitch contours shows that the intonation of surprise DQs differs from that of confirmative ones in that they also exhibit a slight peak on the subject. Pitch alone is thus enough to distinguish the four utterance types tested. The PCA analysis was also used to identify higher-level trends in the data (principal components), two of which appear to correspond to core semantic properties, namely belief change and commitment.
References
- Munteanu, Andrei & Angelika Kiss (2025). Form-meaning realtions in Russian confirmative and surprise declarative questions. Language and Speech.
- Kiss, Angelika & Andrei Muteanu (2021). Form-meaning relations in Russian declarative questions. 4th Semantics/Pragmatics Workshop, October 1st, 2021, Higher School of Economics at Moscow, Russia.