Intonation of modal interrogative sentences in the Altai language (on the Altai-Kizhi folklore material)

The paper describes the intonation structure of modal interrogative sentences of the Altai language by the objective experimental-phonetic methods. Folklore texts and oral speech were the research object. The rhythmomelodic study of the Altai interrogative sentences is acutely topical for both Altaic linguistics and Turkology in general. The communicative significance of modal questions was determined in terms of context and situation. Intonation is the universal means of expressing modal questions: any narrative sentence in Altai can become interrogative when using the ascending intonation on the terminal predicate. Grammatically, interrogativity is expressed by using special question particles, Q-particle ba being the most commonly used in the folklore interrogative utterances. Although intonation is a complex phenomenon, its main constituent part is often considered to be the fundamental tone (f0). Experimental study of the Altai modal interrogative sentence prosody showed that the intonation of modal questions is formed by inclination, with a maximum on the formal indicator of interrogativity - the Q-particle ba . Quantitative parameters turned out to play an important role in the sentences without ba with a finite predicate - the duration of the terminal stressed verb syllable with the maximum value of f0 appeared to be 1.5 times longer than the average syllable length in the utterance. Intonational patterns obtained on the material of colloquial and folk speech of the Altai people generally coincide. The revealed rhythmomelodic features of interrogativity in the Altai literary language are in a good agreement with the supra-segmental data on other Turkic languages of Southern Siberia.

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