Intonation of the English detective story
Journal Title: Науковий вісник Дрогобицького державного педагогічного університету імені Івана Франка. Серія: Філологічні науки (мовознавство) - Year 2018, Vol 9, Issue
Abstract
The present article is a contribution to linguistics as it reports on the intonation peculiarities of the English detective story. The investigation is based on 200 utterances that have been chosen from the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle and represent narrative compositional forms “narration proper”, “description” and “argumentation”. The proposed hypothesis implies that every narrative compositional form in the English detective story can be differentiated by means of a certain acoustic parameter of intonation (voice pitch frequency, voice range, intensity and duration). Argumentation is characterized by average indices of the voice pitch frequency of the principal structural elements in phrases (i.e. the first stressed syllable and the semantic centre). The minimum indices are peculiar to narration. The wider range of voice is observed in argumentation as well. It can be explained by its effort to create tension. The narrower voice range is peculiar to narration proper which is connected with its moderate character. The indices of duration demonstrate that tempo is quite quickened in argumentation. The tendency to slowing down the tempo is observed in narration. The average indices are characteristic of description. Another peculiar feature of all the narrative compositional forms is pauses. They prevail in description and are almost absent in argumentation. Intensity turned out to be the least significant acoustic parameter of intonation in sense-differentiating narrative compositional forms. The obtained data on each narrative compositional form testify that narration, description and argumentation are differed by specific prosodic structures, each having a different quantitative correlation of the acoustically perceived features which help to create genre specificity of the English detective prose.
Authors and Affiliations
С. І. Тихоніна
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP521662
- DOI -
- Views 133
- Downloads 0
Structural and semantic transformations in modern American retold fairy tales
The article focuses on the analysis of the structural and semantic transformations of the modern American retold fairy tales. Special attention is drawn to the spectrum of the new personages’ functions that enable them t...
The dative as an expression of semantic-syntactic relations in a semantically elementary simple sentence
The proposed article is devoted to the analysis of substantive syntaxemes distinguished within the semantic-syntactic approach to the analysis of a simple sentence in Modern Ukrainian. Attention is focused on substantive...
Rendering of usual cross-cultural units in Japanese translations of Taras Shevchenko’s poetry
The paper focuses on the specificity of translation of Ukrainian fixed expressions with national and cultural characteristics into an unrelated language. The issues of possibility / impossibility of preserving their expr...
Echo questions functioning in English conversational discourse: strategies and tactics
The article aims at investigating functional peculiarities of echo questions and developing a typology of the corresponding strategies and tactics. To this end, cognitive, contextual and discourse analyses are employed d...
Ethnic-cultural component of phraseological units
The article deals with the question of ethniccultural component of the structure of phraseological units. Much attention is paid to the investigation of the role of phraseology in the process of categorization and concep...