Temporal Characteristics of Prosody in Imperative Utterances and the Phenomenon of Emphatic Length in the English Language

Abstract

The paper focuses on one of the most effective factors of linguistic manipulation, i.e. imperative utterance. The subject of the study was direct contact appeals, whose structures corresponded to the literary norms of the English language. The research determined and described the temporal component of imperative prosody. The author employed electro-acoustic, mathematical and statistical methods. The phonetic experiment revealed four prosodic structures, as well as their inter-structural and inter-style levels, the degree of temporal fluctuation and the phenomenon of emphatic length, the latter being recognized as the basic temporal feature of imperative prosody. Temporal variation in a phrase and its functional segments in different prosodic structures and in certain extra-linguistic conditions convincingly demonstrates the set of absolute and inter-style markers of this prosodic subsystem. In practice, the results of the present research can be applied in teaching communicatively oriented utterances and in making up the algorithm of automatic speech recognition and synthesis.