Introduction

What is ToRI?

ToRI, a Transcription of Russian Intonation, is a manual transcription system using unambiguous symbols for the prosodic labelling of types of pitch accent, perceptually relevant non-accent-lending pitch movements connecting the pitch accents, and pitch phenomena at boundaries in modern spoken Russian. The forms of pitch accents are described in detail with specifications of the phonetic correlates, with a set of rules for the actual realization of the described pitch accents, and with the main communicative functions of the accents. Though communicative functions are basically restricted to sentence types like question or statement, individual examples are also presented illustrating the sometimes very subtle differences in interpretations of pitch realizations.

In ToRI, many prosodic terms occur that are not always used in the same sense by linguists and phoneticians. These terms can be found in the Glossary.

The ToRI system is implemented on the Internet and freely accessible as an interactive research tool and learning module. Speech materials illustrating the system are selected from corpora in the Moscow and St Petersburg varieties of modern Russian as pronounced by female and male native speakers of different age. The ToRI corpus of spoken Russian presents a large variety of different speech styles, such as short and longer fragments taken from monologues, dialogues, discourse, spontaneous speech, theater, interviews, mass media, read-aloud texts. This variety guarantees that ToRI covers most intonation contours occurring in modern standard Russian. In the final section, isolated examples that were selected from the corpus to illustrate specific pitch phenomena in previous sections are presented in their original longer context.

Who can use ToRI and for what purposes?

ToRI can be used by linguists and advanced students of Russian with a good basic knowledge of Russian phonetics, notably of Russian prosody. It is an interactive system with many audiovisual examples, with training facilities like exercises in transcribing, realizing and imitating contours, and with feedback options.

ToRI can be used without a teacher, and the transcription, if trained daily, is considered learnable within a couple of weeks. The system can also be used with an individual teacher or in a classroom setting. Ideally, users of ToRI learn how to listen to intonation, how to transcribe intonation contours in spoken texts by means of symbols, and how to recognize, imitate and produce the contours correctly.

ToRI can also be used by linguists not knowing Russian, and by anybody generally interested in speech melody and wishing to learn about features of Russian intonation. Therefore, ToRI comes in both an English and Russian version. The text of the examples in the English version appears in the transliteration of the Library of Congress.