PROSODIC EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONAL-AND-PRAGMATIC POTENTIAL OF A SPOKEN ENGLISH PROVERB

Abstract

The paper is a study of the prosodic features involved in the oral actualisation of English proverbs as influenced by structural, emotional and pragmatic factors, which are defined within the framework of a new energetic approach to the research of phonetic phenomena. On the basis of auditory and acoustic analyses of English proverbs, the authors describe the energetic specificity of their prosodic organisation. This description introduces energy-grams formed with the use of a quantitative K-criterion of the texts’ emotional and pragmatic potentials, as well as their typical intonation patterns. Using the traditional method of linguistic interpretation of the results obtained, the authors substantiate invariant and variant intonation patterns of English proverbs, whose parameters are described both within the text’s structural elements and at their junctures. The authors come to the conclusion that an energetic approach to the study of a complex interaction of emotional, pragmatic, semantic and structural factors makes it possible to present a comprehensive description of invariant and variant prosodic patterns for any type of texts on the basis of such fundamental linguistic categories as emotion, pragmatics, structure, and meaning.

Keywords

• English proverb
• pragmatic aim
• structural elements
• algorithmic model
• auditory and acoustic analyses
• prosodic means