On rhythm-forming function of discourse markers

The paper examines one of the features of Russian spontaneous speech: its trend to structural isochrony of its parts, which is especially evident in small phrases/utterances. The research data is taken from two blocks of the Russian Speech Corpus: the SAT balanced annotated corpus and the ORD corpus of Russian everyday communication. The SAT corpus contains monologue speech, whereas the ORD recordings consist of dialogues, polylogues, and isolated utterances. The aim of the given research is to find experimental proof for the hypothesis that the isochrony of spoken language in some cases is maintained by the addition of discourse particles like vot, nu, tam, koroche.