Prosodic organization of English utterances of sympathy

Abstract

The paper is a complex study of prosodic organization of English utterances of sympathy. The research is based on functional and communicative approaches to the study of oral communication and is conducted within the framework of psycho-energetic, social and cultural aspects. In order to objectify the data obtained and explain the dynamic interplay of the speakers’ pragmatic aims and their cultures of micro- and macro-societies we also used the apparatus of linguistic synergetics. All the experimental utterances were classified according to their pragmatic orientation, type of communicative situation, speakers’ social statuses, their social and cultural levels and the level of the utterance emotional and pragmatic potentials. On the auditory analysis stage we found out a set of prosodic means typical of English utterances of sympathy having a definite pragmatic orientation (sympathy proper, compassion, consolation, encouragement). Besides, we singled out the invariant intonation pattern and specific features of its variant realizations. The analysis of video data allowed us to describe the interplay of prosodic means with paralinguistic, lexical and grammatical means as well as define the role of phonetic means in proper decoding of sincerity or insincerity of English utterances of sympathy. Acoustic analysis enabled us to instrumentally verify the data obtained during the auditory stage of the experiment and identify the variant and invariant patterns of English utterances of sympathy prosodic organization. Linguistic interpretation of the obtained results made it possible to model the synergetic processes of the utterances of sympathy self-development based on the individuals’ personal communicative experience acquired within his/her micro- and macro-societies cultures. Using such modeling, we managed to identify that generation and actualization of sympathy of a certain pragmatic type is only possible due to the presence of phonoconcepts prototypes in the individual’s memory, which, in their turn, are able to form one of the four invariant intonation patterns.