Deixis and Event Salience : Statements with Non-final Nuclear Stress in Modern Russian. In modern Russian, statements with non-final nuclear stress are non-canonical prosodic structures in which the elements connecting the predication to the verbal or situational context, usually preposed, are moved to final position, after the stressed rhematic nucleus. Such a discontinuity makes the event that is referred to salient against its situational background, because it has been introduced at first as a complete, self-sufficing state of affairs. The paper focuses on deictic statements referring to an event which occurs in the situation of utterance. It appears that the factors entailing the choice of a structure with non-final nuclear stress are similar to the factors that have been pointed out in cognitive studies on visual salience. The different semantic values expressed by such a structure (sudden awareness, emergency, polemic, high degree) are close to the set of values that are attached in other languages to segmental marks of mirativity or evidentiality.
