How evaluation is transferred in oral discourse in Russian

The paper deals with evaluation in spoken Russian. This phenomenon can be conveyed by various phonetic and rhetoric means which I studied using an experimental approach including an experiment on read speech and one on quasi-spontaneous speech. Some phonetic-prosodic cues, e.g. different pitch phenomena, are commonly said to be relevant for evaluation. As production and perception are equally important, I tested whether native Russian speakers were able to recognize the intended attitudinal meaning even in cases where only the prosody was being presented to them. Noticeably from a rhetorical perspective, questions are frequently used instead of answers for expressing one’s attitude. The structure of the answers given in these contexts has been studied in detail.