Pitch patterns across directives in English, Russian and Polish

Abstract

So far, there has been very little contrastive research on the prosody of directive speech acts. In the present paper an attempt is made to establish differences and similarities between pitch patterns in English, Russian and Polish orders, requests, suggestions and warnings. The speech material comes from dialogues which took place in the adult-child and child-adult communication context. The preliminary results of acoustic and perceptual analyses reveal both language specific and universal features of the intonation contour. In addition, the relationship between the type of directive and pitch pattern modifications is observed.