PERCEIVED STRESS AND THE RHYTHMICAL ORGANIZATION OF THE UTTERANCE IN COLLOQUIAL RUSSIAN

A study of sentence prosody in colloquial Russian (CR) utterances focuses on patterns of individual word stress & interstress syllables within each utterance, as well as overall rhythmical schemes. It is hypothesized that CR has a much greater degree of rhythmical structure than the codified literary language. Recorded dialogues of native Russian speakers (N = 6) were analyzed. It was found that each utterance attempts to provide a pattern of recurrent stressed syllables against a background of unstressed segments. An effect of "informational pulses" is achieved through use of longer word complexes & fewer interstress syllables. The rhythmic structure of CR is very similar to that of some types of Russian poetry. B. Annesser Murray