Effect of word order on yes/no questions in English as compared to Russian

Why English and Russian?
History
Syntax
Contrast
Why yes/no questions?
Types
Views
Intonations
Background

In yes/no questions, English is neutral (unmarked a la Jakobson) because it tends to retain its basic word order, whereas Russian is emphatic (marked) because it tends toward different word orders
Hypothesis

Auxiliaries
Do, be, have
Passive ‘by-’
Modals
‘objazan’ (‘must’), ‘mogu’/‘mog’ (‘can’/’could’ or ‘may’/‘might’), ‘budu’ (‘will’/‘would’ or ‘shall’), and ‘dolžen’ (‘should’)
Behavior
Inversion with subject
Particle “li”
Fronting
Presuppositions
Inverse yes/no questions

Special case
Main verb “be”
VSO in English
Zero form of “be” (est’[PRS])
Noncanonical
“There”
Is there a paper on the table?
Tam est’ bumaga na stole?
“It”
Is it the paper that we are talking about today?
Eto bumaga, o kotoroj my govorim segodnja?
Inverse yes/no questions (cont.)

Similarities
Types
Tags
In English
In Russian
Differences
Echo questions
Echo and tag yes/no questions

Inertness of English verbs
[CP ? [TP she [T [VP swims fast]]]] => [CP doesi [TP she [T ti [VP swim fast]]]]
Russian violation of c-command?
[CP ? [TP ona [T [VP plavajet bystro]]]] => [CP plavajeti li [TP ona [T [VP ti bystro]]]]
PF versus LF
Mat’ ljubit doč’.
Minimalist view

The emotive experiment
Kyril T. Holden and John T. Hogan (1993)
Intonations in yes/no questions

PF versus LF in English
Rising versus falling pitch
High-rise versus low-rise
Long low-rise versus narrow low-rise (Levis 1999)
Intonational effect in Russian
Functional Sentence Perspective
Theme-(transition)-rheme
Topic Focus Articulation
Topic and comment (discourse-neutral information and focus)
Intonations (cont.)

Svetozarova writes:
It is important to emphasise that, whatever means are employed in marking special sentence stress, whether purely phonetic or positional, the effect is in principle the same, namely a kind of “augmented meaning”, the actualisation of certain presuppositions… Thus, sentence intonation in Russian, in the form of one of its most important subsystems – sentence stress – not only organises words into a single meaningful unit, but, by accomplishing this in a variety of ways, succeeds in transmitting extremely important information of a pragmatic nature as well (sic) (1998:269f.).
Intonations (cont.)