Особености на руската и българската интонация в зависимост от смисловата структура на изречението

The functional sentence perspective of utterances excerpted from Russian and Bulgarian texts is compared in the paper with a view to find out to what extent the intonation of parallel Russian and Bulgarian sentences depends on their structural differences, and what are the reasons for the use of a number of typical intonation contours. The paper analyses the range of structural and semantic similarities and differences between simple declarative sentences in Bulgarian and Russian, as well as the respective characteristic functions of word order and intonation as means of marking off the theme and the rheme of the utterance.