Form-Meaning Relations in Russian Confirmative and Surprise Declarative Questions

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Phonetics
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Declarative questions (DQs) are declarative sentences used to pose questions, differing syntactically from information-seeking polar questions (ISQs).
• DQs can express various epistemic stances, including confirmation, surprise, or incredulity, unlike neutral ISQs.
• Prosodic features, particularly intonation, are crucial for distinguishing question types and speaker attitudes across languages.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the acoustic-prosodic differences between information-seeking polar questions (ISQs), confirmative declarative questions (DQs), surprise DQs, and assertions in Russian.
• To analyze the role of pitch and duration in marking different types of biased questions.
• To explore how prosody relates to semantic properties like belief change and speaker commitment.

Main Methods:

• A production study involving native Russian speakers.
• Analysis of acoustic-prosodic features, specifically pitch contours and utterance duration.
• Application of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to pitch contours and overall data trends.

Main Results:

• Declarative questions (DQs) share a rise-fall pitch contour with information-seeking polar questions (ISQs), but the peak location differs (final word vs. verb).
• Surprise DQs are distinguished from confirmative DQs by an additional pitch peak on the subject.
• Pitch variations alone can differentiate between the four utterance types (ISQs, confirmative DQs, surprise DQs, assertions).
• PCA revealed higher-level trends correlating with belief change and commitment, with commitment also linked to utterance duration.

Conclusions:

• Intonation, specifically pitch contour and peak placement, serves as a key differentiator for various question types and assertions in Russian.
• Prosodic cues effectively encode nuanced speaker attitudes and semantic properties like commitment.
• The findings contribute to understanding the formal markedness of biased questions and their acoustic realization across languages.