Intonacija obščego voprosa s neopredelennym mestoimeniem v proiznošenii italʹjancev, izučajuščich russkij jazyk (Articolo in rivista, in russo, titolo in inglese: Intonation of polar questions with indefinite pronouns produced by Italian learners of Russian)

The choice of prosodic structure for an utterance in a foreign language is a non-trivial task for learners, especially when the produced phrase is pragmatically loaded or contains the units that impose restrictions on the choice of tonal configuration. One example of such an utterance in Russian are polar questions with indefinite pronouns. The article presents the results of an experiment aimed to investigate the production of such phrases by Italian learners of Russian. The subjects were instructed to choose the word order in short polar questions and read them aloud with the intonation appropriate for the proposed context. The experimental data allowed to identify some common strategies used by Italian learners of Russian for prosodic marking in the lack of explicit instruction concerning this type of utterances. Most subjects demonstrated the tendency to transfer from their native language the prosody, but not the word order. In addition, the data highlight the necessity to consider dialectal differences when studying prosodic transfer phenomena.