Upstep in Russian echo-questions about expressions

The paper gives an account of Russian echo questions about expressions.The prosodic upstep model is viewed as a means of expressing the illocutionary force of the echo questions about expressions.Upstep can be construed as the fundamental frequency (F0) contour aligned with the segment material long enough to implement a gradual rise from one step of an echo question to another up to the end of the speech act.It is proposed to consider a generalized step of the upstep as a rise of the F0 on the stressed syllable of a phonetic word followed by high post-tonics.At the same time, it is shown that the prosody of the echo question varies, in particular, it depends on the length of the segment material of an echo question.In addition, the upstep model can as well be considered in another meaning: as a function that converts the F0 contour of a wh-question into the F0 contour of the corresponding echo question.Achieving average F0 values significantly higher than the average F0 of any other speech act for each particular speaker is viewed as the "prosodic target" of the upstep model.