Vasik J. Rhythmic Organization of English Political Discourse (An Experimental Phonetic Study of Contemporary British Political Speeches)

This dissertation focuses on the study of rhythmic organization of English political discourse conditioned by the integration of prosodic and semantic rhythms the interaction of which establishes general balance of structural dynamics. It has been found that the specific character of rhythmic organization of English political discourse is predetermined by its communicative pragmatic dominant, genre peculiarities, and the interaction of two anthropocentres creating an adequate rhetoric strategy of English political discourse. Based on the English political speeches of contemporary British politicians peculiar features of communicative timbre of English political discourse have been determined. The communicative timbre, being a synthesis of interaction and variation of the most important components of the language prosodic level, has a certain rhythmometric dimension, which corresponds to the level of expressiveness and ascertains the logic-and-sense delimitation specificity. Invariant and variant prosodic features of the rhythmic model of English political discourse manifested in their melodic, dynamic and temporal characteristics have been experimentally determined. The correlation of prosodic markers and rhythmic units (i.e. syntagms, phrases, intraphrasal and superphrasal units) in the informational space of the discourse creates a macrostep, which is a unit of a certain hierarchical organization, predetermining political speech genre originality.