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In this paper, we will deal with optative constructions (OC) in Russian. Russian has no specialised morphological optative mood but uses a wealth of constructions to express optativity. Optativity is argued to fall into a special class of speech acts that we call manifesting speech acts, characterised by the fact that they directly manifest an emotion or an attitude of the speaker bypassing the description of those states. We distinguish factitive optatives, which mainly use the indicative mood with special markers, some of them being also typical for 3rd person imperatives, and proper optatives which use the subjunctive-conditional mood with different markers. We will classify those markers in classes that define different types of OCs. The particularity of this study is to show also that intonation plays a distinctive role to delimit OCs from other constructions but we will show that there can also be some subtle intonational nuances within OCs.