The Specificities of English Accentuation in the Genre of Lecturing

Abstract

This article focuses on the phonetic specificities and localization of accentual highlighting in the genre of lecturing. Although the phenomenon of accent in the English language has always been in the limelight, some of its aspects still remain uncovered and need further explanation and elaboration in class. The processing of the material with respect to pragmaphonetics and cognitive syllabics seems to be rather promising and problem-solving. It shows most convincingly that to gain a deeper insight into the underlying processes of English accentuation we can by no means confine ourselves only to the phonetic or prosodic means behind the effect of prominence. All the sociocultural-historical and psychological antecedents of the phenomenon in question are to be studied in greater detail. Besides, to eliminate the discrepancies in accentual highlighting between British anglophones, on the one hand, and Russian anglicists, on the other, the innovative trends in modern British English speech culture and the new rhetoric of intellective communication are also to be taken into account.

Keywords

• accentuation
• effect of additional prominence
• syllabics
• pragmaphonetic modelling
• cognitive processing
• ethical aspect of academic discourse.