Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

03.07. Mariia Onoeva (Prag/HU Berlin) & Mariia Razguliaeva (HU Berlin): Polar questions in Russian: Experimental considerations

The talk presents our ongoing work on positive and negative polar questions formed by intonation in Russian. These questions lack special interrogative word order or interrogative particles but are marked prosodically by L+H* pitch accent (Bryzgunova 1975; Meyer & Mleinek 2006; Rathcke 2006; a.o). Esipova & Romero (2023) and Esipova (2024) observe that the pitch accent can be placed either on the inflected verb or on the linearly last stressed syllable, resulting in two distinct interpretations of the question. We argue that this also applies to polar questions with negation which have two different interpretations as well.

We begin the talk by reviewing theoretical findings from the existing literature (including those already mentioned and others), and show how they can be translated into experimentally testable hypotheses. We then present our planned study design, predictions and the example stimuli. Data collection is expected to begin in late July or early August 2025.

Bryzgunova, Elena A. 1975. The declarative-interrogative opposition in Russian. The Slavic and East European Journal 19(2). 155. doi:10.2307/306768.
Esipova, Maria & Maribel Romero. 2023. Prejacent truth in rhetorical questions Ms., University of Konstanz. In prep.
Esipova, Maria. 2025. Prosody across sentence types. Semantics and Linguistic Theory 68–87. doi:10.3765/pe3dtd58.
Meyer, Roland & Ina Mleinek. 2006. How prosody signals force and focus—a study of pitch accents in Russian yes–no questions. Journal of Pragmatics 38(10). 1615–1635.
Rathcke, Tamara. 2006. A perceptual study on Russian questions and statements. AIPUK 37. 51–62.