A Question or an Answer? (“Hat Patterns” in Russian Intonation)

This paper deals with the phrase intonation of declarative sentences and yes-no questions with “hat patterns” in dialogues, from 12 types of Northern Russian dialects. The study reveals that in the direction from North to South (in other words, from the periphery to the center of the Russian dialectal continuum) the explicit transition is found from purely dialectal intonational patterns to the tunes, characteristic to the Standard Russian variety of language. Meanwhile, despite the fact that the “hat pattern” is characteristic to both polar questions and reactive declaratives in Arkhangel’sk dialects, the consistent difference is found for these tunes in the timing of the “hat” contour for different communicative types within one idiom (being significantly more late in answers than in yes-no questions), although an answer in one dialect may be fully identical to a question in another one. The contour itself being now termed “broad hat” from our point of view better fits the definition of the “cap pattern”.