abstract
- Intonation in heritage languages is a much less researched linguistic domain than,for example, morphosyntax. This chapter reports on several studies investigating the intonation of Russian and German bilingual speakers, based on the datafrom the RUEG corpus, in their heritage language and/or in the majority language.Section 3 addresses overall intonational features in (heritage) Russian, relating tophrasing and frequency of pitch accents. Section 4 reports findings on intonationused for various phenomena at linguistic interfaces, such as intonation in (heritage) Russian yes/no questions (Section 4.1), for contrastive adjective focus in(heritage) Russian (Section 4.2) and in discourse linking in heritage and majorityGerman (Section 4.3). Section 5 addresses the perception of accents by (heritage)Russian listeners. Together, the studies reveal that heritage language speakers andmonolingually-raised speakers show differences in prosodic realization and perception, although such differences are more quantitative than qualitative in nature.
