PROSODIC MARKERS OF THE SPEAKER'S SOCIAL STATUS

Abstract

Diversity of forms and kinds of speech communication and variability of national and regional accents in contemporary English define the necessity of phonetic variation study of oral speech and clearing up its sources. The speaker's accent indicates his social status (social class, education, religious, ethnic, professional affiliation). The present article is dedicated to the study of the speaker's social status prosodic markers. Complex prosodic investigation of speech behavior of the Australian native speech representatives of different professions has been conducted in the paper. The comparison of the revealed data allowed to state that the highest prosodic index is registered in the actress's speech and the lowest in the speech of the politician. Frequency range is correspondingly the widest in actress's speech, which can witness the high tonetic explication of female voice. The received by acoustic method intonograms allowed to speak about maximum frequency localization on the terminal tone in the speech of all the investigated informants. Corresponding to the aim and tasks of the paper prosodic markers of various professions of Australians have been defined. Prosodic markers of Australian politician are the following moderate pausation, which is revealed in speech delimitation average frequency range, and low tonetic variation. Main prosodic marker of the architect's speech is very insignificant syntagmatic division, prevalence of non-pausation means of utterance delimitation, monotonous character of speech due to low tonetic variation. Real estate agent and actress's speech can be defined as emotional on account of high tonetic level, wide frequency range, low recurrence of non-pausation delimitation and heightened level of tonetic utterance completion.