Aleksenko S. Variation of Apology Intonation Model in Speech Communication: An Experimental Phonetic Study of English Dialogical Speech

The dissertation focuses on the study of prosodic subsystems' structural and functional features that cause variation of English apology intonation model. The sociocultural contexts that stipulate intonational variation of apologies in speech communication were specified. Explicit and implicit apology verbal strategies enabled systematization of English apologies' functional and semantic types and their classification according to the communicative situation, pragmatic aim and degree of emotional intensity, as well as the speaker's / hearer's social status. The systemic classification made it possible to establish the correlation of apologies' functional and semantic characteristics with certain complexes of speech prosodic subsystems. The research has resulted in the substantiation and experimental ascertainment of invariant features constituting the prosody of apologies as a unit of intonation level. There were experimentally established variant prosodic features of the apology intonation model thatserve to distinguish their functional and semantic types in formal and informal communicative situations.