INTONATION PECULIARITIES OF ENGLISH JUDICIAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

The article is devoted to the description of the results of the auditory analysis of the texts belonging to a judicial discourse. The immediate aim of the article is to identify the peculiarities of the intonation organization of the oral English court speeches. The object of the study is judicial discourse as a special type of institutional discourse of persuasive type. The subject of the study is the peculiarities of the intonation organization of oral court speeches, proclaimed during court hearings by a defence counsel and a prosecutor. To achieve the aim, a phonetic study of the perceived prosodic characteristics of speech realizations of court speech was carried out, in the process of which the subjective method of scientific observation was used, which contains auditive and auditory analysis of the selected objects as well as determining the phonological status of the studied units; quantitative analysis made it possible to interpret the data obtained empirically during the auditory analysis. The conducted auditive and auditory analysis made it possible to draw certain conclusions concerning the intonation organization common for the studied oral texts of judicial discourse. The identification by the auditors of parts of the court speeches of the prosecutor and the defence counsel proved the validity of their division into the compositional parts and made it possible to conclude that there are certain linguistic factors that allow to identify parts of the text with the high degree of probability. The leading intonation parameter for achieving or strengthening the convincing effect of the speeches is considered the tempo. The melodic component of intonation, namely the melodic contour, has also proved to be a powerful intonation means of influencing and achieving a persuasive effect, while loudness is not considered to be an important intonation parameter involved in persuasion. The conducted study has identified the role of the components of intonation (pitch, loudness and tempo) in the implementation of the function of persuasion of the institutional discourse.