PROSODIC VARIATION OF SPEECH IN A VICTORIAN NOVEL

Abstract

VARIATION OF SPEECH IN A VICTORIAN NOVEL This paper is devoted to characterization of prosodic features of the narrator’s speech and direct speech fragments in a Victorian novel by Jane Austen «Pride and Prejudice» represented by a professional actor in audio version. The aim of the research is to conduct a contrastive analysis of the narrator’s speech prosody and personified speech prosody and reveal the way they change due to communicative intent. This phonetic research is based on auditory and acoustic analysis and investigates speech melody (different configurations of pitch curves and types of terminal tones), FO range and intensity variability, tempo (mean syllable duration), pausation, rhythm and types of voice quality. The research was conducted on the basis of different types of utterances (exclamations, descriptions, evaluative and emotional statements, questions and answers) which differ according to the degree of prosodic prominence and implicitness or explicitness of emotion expression. The results of the research showed that the narrator’s speech is less emotional than direct speech fragments of Austen’s characters. The latter demonstrate a wide variety of prosodic means of expressiveness to manifest different emotions. In the present paper the expression of positive and negative emotions in personified speech by means of prosody were studied. To express different types of binary emotions in stylized speech of characters the actor uses a particular combination of prosodic components which help to create voice portraits of characters to be easily distinguished by listeners. aspect of utterances can be defined and expressed only by means of prosody. In the process of comparing and contrasting prosodic characteristics of narrator’s speech and direct speech realizations of characters we arrived at the conclusion that each type of speech has some inherent prosodic features which seem to be highly idiosyncratic.