Quantitative Analysis of Pitch Movement in Spontaneous Speech of Regional Russian Native Speakers

NRU HSE , 2018. No. 66.

Ilya Yu. Chechuro

The paper deals with the intonation of native speakers of several regional variants of Russian. I analyze how simple characteristics of pitch movement are connected to biological sex, age, place of living, and type of spontaneous text. According to my primary hypothesis, the distribution of pitch in “low”, “middle” and “high” parts of the pitch range and the number of movements from one range into other ones can predict the aforementioned characteristics of the recordings as well as reveal the individual characteristics of speakers (Vol’skaya 2014, Féry 2017). I demonstrate that in my model the only significant parameter is the biological sex of the speakers, which means that this distribution is unlikely to be determined by the regional differences. The study has been conducted as a part of the project on statistical analysis of regional variants of Standard Russian and minority languages of Russia.

Keywords: русский язык, статистические модели, quantitative analysis, Russian, intonation, интонация, statistical models, Regional variants of Russian, региональные варианты русского языка, квантитативный анализ