Prosodic models of accentuated personalities’ English public speeches

Abstract

The paper advances typical prosodic models of the accentuated personalities’ English public speeches. The inaugural and convention speeches delivered by the American presidents and British prime ministers within the second half of the 20th century served as the material of the study. It was found out that the effective realization of any public speech is determined by the rational choice of linguistic as well as the adequate use of prosodic means for its organization. The authors regard the accentuated language personality as a speaker with enhanced traits of his/her character or temperament which are revealed in the process of his / her communicative activity within the range of acceptable psychological norm and beyond it. It is outlined that in order to conduct the study of prosodic features of the English accentuated personalities’ public speaking the authors created the program and methodology of a complex experimental phonetic research which was carried out in four stages. It is singled out that the politicians, whose inaugural and convention speeches were analyzed, belong to four types of accentuation of their character: demonstrative, impulsive, obsessive-compulsive, and paranoid. The determined prosodic peculiarities of the accentuated politicians' public speaking which were gained by means of the auditory analysis are presented. Besides, the results of the acoustic analysis of the experimental material, linguistic interpretation and generalization of the obtained data enabled the authors to figure out the invariant and variant prosodic models of the accentuated politicians’ public speaking.