Kutsenko M. Prosodic organization of sympathy utterances in English speech (an experimental phonetic study)

The paper aims at revealing English sympathy utterances prosodic organization by means of advancing typical intonation patterns of their actualization. The research object is sympathy utterances’ oral realization in English speech. The regularities of prosodic means’ functioning and interplay in English speech as a result of structural, emotional, pragmatic, social and cultural factors’ influence constitute the scope of the research. The research methodology is based on communicative-and-functional and functional-and-energetic approaches. It also employs different aspects of cognitive-and-discursive approach and theoretical principles of phonetics and phonology. The methodological procedures of the scientific research include general scientific, empiric-and-theoretic) and special (auditory and acoustic analyses) methods as well as methods of modeling, graphic and linguistic interpretation and the methods of quantitative data analysis. The scientific novelty of the obtained results lies in defining four typical models of the sympathy utterances’ generation; creating an integrated scheme of communicative factors’ interplay in the process of sympathy realization; systemizing verbal and non-verbal features that influence the variability of English sympathy utterances’ prosodic organization; experimental ascertainment of typical intonation and energetic patterns of oral realization of sympathy utterances. The theoretical significance of the thesis consists in substantiation of the key linguistic features of oral sympathy realization which is the contribution to general phonetics, intonology, phonostylistics, emotiology, communicative and pragmatic linguistics, and rhetoric. The experimentally ascertained invariant and variant prosodic patterns of sympathy utterances actualized in formal and informal communicative situations contribute to communication theory. The practical value of the results obtained lies in the possibility of their application in teaching theoretical (“Supra-segmental language level”) and practical phonetics of English (“Intonation structure of the utterance”, “Phonostylistics”, “Speech intonation”), stylistics (“Emotional syntax”), general linguistics (“Language and non-verbal means of communication”), and in optional courses in speech culture, linguistic synergetics, and psycholinguistics.