Інтонація чоловічих негативних оцінних висловлень у сучасному англійському діалогічному мовленні

Abstract

The article deals with a gender-oriented experimental phonetic study of explicit male negative evaluative utterances in modern English everyday dialogical speech. The realization of the category of evaluation in speech is in the limelight of modern sociolinguistic research aimed at establishing the linguistic behaviour peculiarities and verbalization of roles, norms and values attributed to men and women by society. Evaluation is objectified in language units of lexical, phonetic, syntactic and discourse levels. Negative evaluative utterances verbalise the negative evaluation of the object that doesn’t meet the subject’s expectations according to certain criteria. On the basis of auditory and acoustic analyses prosodic markers of male negative rational and emotional evaluative utterances in communication between men and in communication with women of the same social status have been outlined: pitch pattern, loudness, tempo and pausation. Invariant prosodic features of male negative evaluative utterances in communication between representatives of the same and different sex but of the same social status have been established: mid level pre-head; descending stepping and mid level scales; mid, narrowed and wide ranges of intonation group; high and low falling terminal tones; falling and rising-falling pitch contour; moderate tempo; moderate loudness; sad and dramatic timbre; voice pitch frequency maximum on head and nucleus of the first or second intonation group; peak intensity on nucleus and the first rhythm group; minimal average syllable duration; small and average unfilled tentative reflective pauses. Variant prosodic features of the following male negative evaluative utterances have been distinguished: 1. Rational evaluative utterances in communication between men: level pitch contour; accelerated tempo; reduced loudness; peak intensity on another rhythm group than pre-head, head and nucleus; small unfilled and average filled tentative choice pauses; 2. Rational evaluative utterances in communication between men and women: ascending stepping scale; the Low Low-Rise and the Rise; falling-rising pitch contour; increased loudness; small unfilled tentative psychological pauses; short filled tentative reflective pauses; intemporal psychological pauses; 3. Emotional evaluative utterances in communication between men: increased and reduced loudness; peak intensity on another rhythm group than pre-head, head and nucleus; small unfilled tentative psychological pauses; intemporal psychological, choice and reflective pauses; 4. Emotional evaluative utterances in communication between men and women: ascending stepping scale; widened and narrow ranges of intonation group; the Low Low-Rise and the High Rise-Fall; short average syllable duration; small filled tentative choice pauses; average filled tentative reflective pauses.