ʻYEAH, YEAH, YEAH, YEAH, YEAH!ʼ AND THE OTHER CHAINS OF REPEATED WORDS IN EVERYDAY RUSSIAN SPEECH IN THE LIGHT OF SPEECH PROSODY PATTERNS

 Repetition of words in immediate succession is a common phenomenon of Russian everyday speech. Prosodic characteristics of the chains of repeated words like da, da, da (yeah, yeah, yeah) or nu, nu, nu (well, well, well) deserve special attention of phoneticians, since it seems that they may help to reveal the basic speech prosody patterns. The research is based on data obtained from the ORD corpus of everyday Russian speech. N-grams analysis was performed for speech transcripts of 900 000 words, and the frequencies of utterances consisting of two and three identical words in a row were obtained, as well as preliminary data on frequencies for the chains of three and five identical words. It turned out that in Russian everyday speech the following words are used in such repetitive structures most frequently: da (yes/yeah), nu (well), vot (well, here), tak (so, well), shchas (right now) and some other high-frequency elements of oral discourse, many of which are commonly referred to as discourse markers. The absolute ʻleaderʼ among them is the particle da (yes/yeah). When studying such repetitive structures, it is important to distinguish whether they are integral (inseparable) from the prosodic point of view or whether they are a combination of smaller word chains. Difficulty may arise in determining their rhythmic structures, since prosodic prominence of different kind may be observed on several elements of such word chains (e. g., on initial and final words). To test the hypothesis of the existence of invariant prosodic models, it is necessary to conduct a study on a representative speech data set, and it seems appropriate to start such research by modelling prosody patterns for small-sized (e. g., consisting of two or three words) isolated utterances.