“Kartina, korzina, kartonka…”: Prosodic labelling of enumeration contexts in poetry reading in Russian

The present exploratory study aimed to test some notions regarding the prosody of enumeration in Russian on a small corpus of readings of a poem Luggage by Samuil Marshak performed by six speakers of Standard Russian. The recordings were labeled manually in Praat. A high degree of interspeaker variability was attested in the data. In accordance with previous findings, the data demonstrates that the choice between two pitch accents most widely used to mark enumeration in Russian (L*+H and L*) correlates with speech tempo. Within the lines read at a lower speaking rate the speakers produced more frequently the combination of accents H* L* H%, a tune referred to as IK-4 in traditional descriptions of Russian prosody.