Acquisition of word order and prosody in polar questions with indefinite pronouns by Italian learners of Russian

Since Russian possesses a rich system of indefinite pronouns [1], the instruction on the correct choice of a pronoun is considered an essential part of L2 Russian curricula. However, explicit teaching usually does not include information on prosody and word order in constructions with indefinites. Namely, no instruction is provided in learning books on the prominence placement constraints in Russian, such as deaccentuation of specific and nonspecific indefinite pronouns (the series with affixes -to and -nibud’): Я что-то УСЛЫШАЛ or Я УСЛЫШАЛ что-то ‘I heard something’. These constraints are by no means universal. For example, as pointed out in [2, pp. 237–238], the indefinites in Italian are normally accented: Ho sentito QUALCOSA ‘I heard something’. Language learning theories predict that such cross-linguistic differences can lead to the transfer of L1 features. To test these predictions, an experiment was designed. We chose to focus on Russian information-seeking yes/no questions, since their prosody is relatively well-studied within the autosegmental metrical model [3]–[5]. Another reason for choosing yes/no questions is that they normally require the non-specific -nibud’ series of pronouns. The segmental structure of this suffix facilitates the pitch measurements in post-accented syllables.