PROSODIC PHRASING IN PROSE: HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE AND MEANS OF ITS REALIZATION

This paper deals with the problem of prosodic phrasing in a spoken Russian text. The introductory section provides a brief description of the background, clarifies the basic terms, and explains some important concepts: prosodic break, the strength of the word boundary, the depth of prosodic break. The second section discusses the history of the issue, shows the role of Russian linguists and textual esearchers in the discovery of this important speech phenomenon and understanding its hierarchical and functional nature. It also describes the current state of research in this area, highlightes the main directions of modern fundamental studies and applications, and notes their relevance and the need to expand their empirical base for different languages, including Russian. The examples of prosodic labelling of poetic and prose texts are given here in the original transcription of Scherba and Avanesov, with equivalent recordings using the quantitative scale of prosodic indexes—similar to the labelling scheme adopted in foreign prosodic studies. The third section addresses the issues of local markers of prosodic phrasing, their hierarchy and their means of realization. Particular attention is paid to such means, as physical pause, terminal phenomena, in particular the final syntagmatic (syntactic) accent. This section contains also a brief description of autosegmental metrical theory, which attempts to integrate metrics and phrasing into a single model. The last section discusses the correlation of prosodic phrasing with syntactic sentence structure. It is emphasized that in order to solve this complex problem it is necessary to create representative speech corpora with detailed and reliable syntactic and prosodic annotations.