Southern Russian stød: Phonetics or phonology?

Prosodic systems of Southern Russian dialects spoken in the regions of Kaluga, Ryazan’, and Lipetsk possess a specific rising tonal accent H*+^H* (level high + rising + level extra-high + falling tone) utilized in yes-no questions and non-final parts of utterances. In the oldest speakers’ speech this accent is accompanied by some kind of laryngeal activity, acoustic correlates of which are quite similar to those of Danish stød: it is a non-modal phonation type (glottal squeak) where the first part of the syllable is characterized acoustically by a high intensity level; in the second part there is a considerable decrease in intensity, a noticeable leap in fundamental frequency, and an evident aperiodicity of the speech signal; on the boundary between the two phases most speakers have a strong glottal constriction. Phonologically, the F0 perturbation of Danish stød is a side effect of laryngealization and the stød itself, bound to definite syllables in certain word types, and is seen as a single object attaching to a particular node in the metrical structure, not a composite tonal entity; while in Russian dialects it is a significant part of the H*+^H*pitch accent, used to distinguish it from the very similar L*+H* one found in narrow focus statements. Diachronically, Russian “stød” in the H*+^H* pitch accent may be seen as a consequence of the compression of an archaic L*+H H- L% melodic contour into one syllable; nowadays the original H*+^H* accent seems to be transforming into the much simpler H* found in Western Russian dialects.