PHRASE INTONATION OF A SOUTH-WEST ARKHANGEL’SK DIALECT

This paper deals with the phrase intonation of a Northern Russian idiom spoken in the village Klimovskoe, Konosha district, Arkhangel’sk region. The study based on the material of dialectal speech tape recordings made in 1970 (8 female speakers, all born before 1914, total duration — fi ve and a half hours) reveals that the most characteristic features of the south-west Arkhangel’sk dialect are:
1) the use of specifi c melodic contour (so to say, ‘sloping hat’) for yes-no questions, formed by rising pitch accent and low boundary tone with no phrase accent (L+H* L%) as opposed to north-eastern Arkhangel’sk dialects utilizing high phrase accent (‘broad hat’, L+H* Н- L%) for these purposes, and to Standard Modern Russian exploiting the low phrase tone (‘sharp hat’, L+H* L- L%);
2) high initial boundary tone (%H) in neutral statements;
3) high level tone of pre-nuclear pitch accents (downstepped !H*) in neutral statements;
4) the use of downstepped high fi nal boundary tone for incompleteness (non-fi nality) marking.
In addition, our data proves that downstep is not necessarily triggered by the pre sence of bitonal accents and that final lowering cannot be the only reason for the observed scaling eff ect.