Prosody against syntax in Russian relative clauses
The paper addresses the problem of discrepancy between syntacticand prosodic grouping in Russian relative clauses. Basing on the first-hand natural spoken discourse data (oral corpora systematically annotated for prosodic details, including pausation and pitch movements) the paper demonstrates structural and prosodic “autonomy” of relative clauses from their heads, which previously remained unnoticed in the literature on rela- tivization based mainly on written data. The paper argues that in Russian the syntax /prosody discrepancy emerges as an effect of the discourse tendency for “ideal delivery” with intonation units matching syntactic clauses.