Institute of Phonetic Sciences,

The aim of research project ToRI (2002−2006) is a description of phonetic, phonological and functional properties of Russian intonation with a manual transcription system using unambiguous symbols that will be adapted for and implemented on the Internet as a free interactive research tool and learning module ToRI: Transcription of Russian Intonation. The intended result is a reliable and reproducible transcription system for spoken corpora of Russian (Moscow and St Petersburg varieties). To our knowledge, ToRI will be the first transcription of its kind in which experimentally verified relations between form and contextual function are expressed in unambiguous symbols. ToRI will be designed in such a way that it can be used as a learnable system for linguists and advanced students, as a research tool for (field)work on Russian dialects and intonational contact phenomena of Russian dialects with local languages in Russia, and for comparative and language typology studies. It might also be useful for the development of speech synthesis and, possibly, speech recognition. In this paper some aspects and some first results in the process toward ToRI will be discussed.