Prosody of the russian verse line

One of the topical concerns for the linguistic analysis of verse is the study of its intonation structure. This article describes the main attributes of the tonal prosody in a verse line. These are as follows: the narrowing of the pitch range, a maximum pitch rise on the first stressed syllable, and lowered frequency of the falling boundary tone. Using the calculated values for each of these three parameters, the article provides a generalized representation for the melodic structure of the verse line. It is also suggested that this generalized structure is characteristic not only of the Russian language but also of other languages and verse systems. Within the framework of studying the general form of the verse line and analyzing the possible peculiarities of its structure, a corpus has been gathered that consists of recorded poetic texts exhibiting various types of rhythmic organization and syntactic structure, read by eight informants. The plan is to expand this corpus in the course of further studies devoted to the intonation structure of verse by adding, inter alia, corresponding materials in other languages, and to use the corpus for further phonetic research.