Prosodic diversity in Standard Russian: pitch alignment in Central and Northern varieties

This study examines the phonetic realisation of the falling nuclear pitch accent that marks contrastive focus statements and wh-questions in Russian. An interactive dialogue-reading task elicited acoustic data from speakers of two regional varieties: Central Standard Russian spoken in Moscow (CSR), and Northern Standard Russian spoken in urban areas of the Vologda region (NSR). The two varieties differ in patterns of vowel reduction; while CSR is characterised by lengthening of immediately pretonic vowels, shorter vowels are observed in this position in NSR. Moscow Russian is also reported to display optional extra-early alignment of high turning points in falling accent, associating F0 peaks with the immediately pretonic syllable. Our data provides the first evidence that falling accents in NSR do not demonstrate the same tendency. The Vologda subjects tended to align the high turning point significantly later than the Muscovites, and the pitch maximum was rarely reached before the stressed vowel. Two possible interpretations of these findings are proposed. First, the observed alignment differences can be treated as an outcome of tune-text negotiation, with the option to associate the H target of the bitonal nuclear accent with the pretonic syllable available in Standard Russian, only if the first prestressed vowel is phonetically long. In addition, the NSR data bears resemblance to recent findings concerning an archaic northern dialect with nuclear monotonal H* instead of the bitonal H*+L/H+L* attested in Standard Russian. Therefore, it is suggested that the alignment pattern observed in NSR could be a relic of the archaic monotonal northern nuclear accent transformed under the influence of the dominant standardised variety.