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Prosodic diversity in Standard Russian: pitch alignment in Central and Northern varieties
This study examines the phonetic realisation of the falling nuclear pitch accent that marks
corrective focus statements and wh-questions in Russian. An interactive dialogue-reading
task elicited acoustic data from speakers of two regional varieties: Central Standard Russian
spoken in Moscow (CSR), and Northern Standard Russian spoken in urban areas of the
Vologda region (NSR). The two varieties differ in patterns of vowel reduction; while CSR is
characterised by lengthening of immediately pretonic vowels, shorter vowels are observed
in this position in NSR. Moscow Russian is also reported to display optional extra-early
alignment of high turning points in falling accent, associating F0 peaks with the immediately
pretonic syllable. Our data provides the first evidence that falling accents in NSR do
not demonstrate the same tendency. The Vologda subjects tended to align the high turning
point significantly later than the Muscovites, and the pitch maximum was rarely reached before
the stressed vowel. Two possible interpretations of these findings are proposed. First,
the observed alignment differences can be treated as an outcome of tune-text negotiation,
with the option to associate the H target of the bitonal nuclear accent with the pretonic syllable
available in Standard Russian, only if the first prestressed vowel is phonetically long. In
addition, the NSR data bears resemblance to recent findings concerning an archaic northern
dialect with nuclear monotonal H* instead of the bitonal H*+L/H+L* attested in Standard
Russian. Therefore, it is suggested that the alignment pattern observed in NSR could be a
relic of the archaic monotonal northern nuclear accent transformed under the influence of
the dominant standardised variety.