PROSODIC MEANS ACTUALIZING EMOTIONAL-AND-PRAGMATIC POTENTIAL OF AN ENGLISH ANECDOTE

Abstract

The paper is a study of prosodic features of English anecdotes’ oral actualization influenced by structural, functional as well as emotional and pragmatic factors, which are defined within the framework of a new functional-and-energetic approach to the research of phonetic phenomena. On the basis of auditory and acoustic analyses of English anecdotes the author describes the energetic specificity of their prosodic organization using the fundamental theoretical principle of conserving the utterance emotional-and-pragmatic potential, which allows analyzing oral speech actualization within the following coordinates: “emotion”– “pragmatics” – “meaning”. To characterize the specificity of a complex interaction of emotional, pragmatic, semantic and structural factors of prosodic subsystems of the English anecdote, we systematized its structural elements into two algorithmic models presenting the text story-line development: one being similar to the structure of the fairy tale (introduction → commentary → code), and the other resembling the riddle (topic → commentary → code). Using the traditional method of linguistic interpretation of the obtained results the author substantiates invariant and variant intonation patterns of English anecdotes, whose parameters are described both within the text structural components and at their junctures. It introduces energygrams formed with the use of a quantitative K-criterion of the texts’ emotional and pragmatic potentials as well as their typical intonation-and-energy patterns. The energygrams analysis revealed that anecdotes are characterized by a low level of their emotional and pragmatic potentials at the initial structural elements as well as by the increase of pragmatic potential to a high zone, and emotional – to a low zone of the middle level within “the code”. The increase of the text emotional and pragmatic potentials is primarily conditioned by semantic contrasts which acquire the role of the text semantic centers due to being marked by prosodic contrasts. The author comes to the conclusion that the application of a functional-and-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 of any type of texts.