Prosody of contrastive adjectives in mono- and bilingual speakers of English and Russian: a corpus study

Abstract

The study reports on the frequency of occurrence and prosodic realization of adjective-noun phrases in which the adjective is contrastively focused. The productions of bilingual speakers are investigated in both their languages, Heritage Russian and majority English. The data are extracted from a corpus of semi-spontaneous speech which was collected in a comparable way from mono- and bilingual speakers in the U.S. and Russia. Results of the analysis show that there is a language-specific difference in that Russian speakers use ADJ CF +N combinations less frequently than English speakers despite a reported parallel between the languages in terms of semantics and prosody. Moreover, English and Russian seem to differ in their accentuation pattern in ADJ CF +N. Speakers of Russian as a Heritage Language frequently use double accents in ADJ CF +N. Across English and Russian, double accents in ADJ CF +N occur more frequently in formal than in informal situation, and more frequently in bilingual than in monolingual speakers. The results are discussed in light of the often reported tendency in heritage language grammars to avoid ambiguity.