Temporal Aspects of Intonational Phrasing (Evidence from Russian)

The present paper investigates temporal parameters of vowels occurring before the boundaries of major intonation units—intonational phrases and utterances. The research is based on the analysis of approximately 12 hours of speech from the Corpus of Professionally Read Speech (CORPRES). Our data show that before major prosodic boundaries the stressed vowel of the last word is lengthened, and so does the post-stressed vowel if immediately preceding the boundary; this is true even when the last word does not bear nuclear stress. The degree of lengthening is influenced by the presence of a pause after the boundary, the boundary “depth”, the location of nuclear stress in the unit, and pitch movement type. The temporal organization of two different pitch contours realized before a prosodic boundary is described as well.