The patterns of prosodic transfer in polar questions produced by Italian learners of Russian

In languages lacking overt grammatical marking of polar questions, the acquisition of interrogative prosody by non-native speakers constitutes an essential part of their foreign language proficiency. Both Russian and Italian belong to this group of languages. In Standard Russian, the intonational marking of polar questions is one of the better studied elements of the prosodic system. The Russian yes-no question tune is characterized in literature as a sharp nuclear rise associated with the last prosodically prominent syllable, followed by an abrupt fall and a stretch of low pitch sustained until the phrasal boundary. All in all, several autosegmental metrical descriptions of Russian intonation (Duryagin, 2023, Igarashi, 2006, Rathcke, 2013) agree in interpreting this tune as a L*+H L% (or L*+H L-L%, depending on the decision about the necessity to include phrase accents in the description of Russian intonation).