Social factors of the prosodic design of the utterance

Abstract

This article analyzes peculiarities of the melodic composition of pre-terminal part of a sense-group in the speech of native speakers of American English who are representatives of different age and gender groups living on the territory of the United States. The present investigation is dedicated to the analysis of the melodic characteristics of American representatives of different age and gender groups’ speech. Age is considered the basic of human being, it defines the boundaries of human development and social opportunities of a person. Often age demands from the individual the corresponding behavior. Judging by the opinion of sociophoneticians age changes in speech touch the whole spectrum of prosodic components including dynamic ones, however age can’t be considered the only factor, influencing the peculiarity of individual’s speech behavior. Majority of investigations prove that there is also an interconnection between gender and territorial peculiarities of the speech. A person presents a complex unity of personal and social principles, which means that any changes, which occur are defined by the variety of physiological and social forces. The conducted instrumental investigation showed that dynamic characteristics of speech are quite informative for defining age identification of American variant representatives.