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

This talk present results from a naturalness judgement experiment with audio on intonation in Russian polar (yes/no) questions. Previous work (Meyer & Mleinek 2006; Esipova 2025; Munteanu & Kiss 2025; a.o.) shows that in questions like Jana kupila knigu? ‘Did Jana buy a book?’, prosodic prominence can fall either on the verb (kupila) or sentence finally, here on the object (knigu): verb prominence results in a neutral, polarity-seeking reading, while end prominence requires supporting evidence from context. We extend these observations to negative polar questions, where two prominence positions are also available but remain theoretically underdescribed. We manipulated question polarity, prominence placement, immediate context, and the inquirer’s prior beliefs. The results support the previous theoretical observations: native speakers do distinguish between two prominence placements, and question naturalness is then modulated by context. In neutral contexts, positive polar questions with prominence on the verb were rated significantly higher than positive questions with end prominence. The pattern is reversed in contexts containing evidence for the expressed proposition. The study also brings new findings for negative polar questions: questions with verb prominence and negation are felicitous in neutral unbiased contexts, while end prominence and negation require evidence for ¬p. This shows that prosody differentiates between two readings in negative questions, namely evaluative and real sentential negation readings. Finally, we discuss limitations of the study and future research directions.

 

References:

Meyer, R. & Mleinek, I. 2006. How prosody signals force and focus—A study of pitch accents in Russian yes–no questions. Journal of Pragmatics

Esipova, M. 2025. Prosody across sentence types. Semantics and Linguistic Theory

Munteanu, A. & Kiss, A. 2025. Form-Meaning Relations in Russian Confirmative and Surprise Declarative Questions. Language and Speech