PROSODIC VARIABILITY AND PROSODIC PORTRAIT CONSTRUCTION

Abstract

The aim of our research is to provide an overview of scientific literature on prosodic variation and to construct prosodic portraits of ten book characters voiced by one linguistic persona. The main objectives are determining the variability of prosodic features of a linguistic persona and identifying the prosodic characteristics that are stereotypically associated with a particular social/cultural group and/or an emotional state. Thus, the object of the research are pitch, rate and voice quality characteristics of a linguistic persona in voice acting. The new aspect brought to the field is the focus on variation of prosodic features of one linguistic persona performing ten different voice-overs. The method used for the purpose is acoustic analysis. The material is David Crystal’s autobiography read by the author. The data suggest the presence of relevant discriminating parameters common to the three distinctive age and gender groups and prove the necessity to resort to cluster analysis while constructing a prosodic portrait. Thus, frequency aspect helps to affiliate a character to a particular gender-age group while temporal aspect is associated with the emotional state of the speaker. Voice quality may indicate age group of a speaker but its parameters are found to be most constant among all prosodic cues. It is revealed that specific personal characteristics of a character depend on the combinations of pitch, articulation rate and voice quality parameters.

Keywords

• prosody
• linguistic persona
• articulation rate
• pitch
• voice quality
• просодия
• языковая личность
• мелодика
• темп
• качество голоса