INTONATION OF NARRATIVE UTTERANCES OF THE ALTAI LANGUAGE (ON THE MATERIAL OF THE ALTAI-KIZHI FOLKLORE)
In this paper, we have studied the intonation of the Altai language spoken by the native Altai people living in the Altai Republic, Russia. The frame of our work was the Altai-kizhi folk narrative stories. We focused only on declarative statements. The results obtained were compared with the ones given by our primary study, where the interrogative intonation of the same folk texts was under consideration. In our works, we rely on the auditive and computer (Praat) analysis. So, the unique intonation features of the folk statements with action propositions were found out. Firstly, when describing the fundamental frequency (f0) patterns, f0 maxima of an utterance were found on the syllables of words which are the information focus of an utterance or belong to the folk clichés. Secondly, we studied the relevant literature on the linguistics of folk texts and followed the folklore composition structure when sorting the statements for the further analysis. The typical folklore text is structured as follows: beginning-plot development-ending; intonation variations are most significant in the plot development part, beginning and ending being more invariant. Generally, the Altai folklore statements are characterized by rising-falling or falling intonation. To conclude, not only the intonation of the folk statement with f0 marking the folk clichés reveals its text position, but propositions realized in the speech of the Altai-kizhi speakers as well.