THE PROSODIC EMPHASIS OF BRITISH AND AMERICAN LECTURES

Abstract

The focus of the study is prosodic emphasis and its correlation with the sociocultural characteristics of native speakers who have shown them during lectures. Thus, the accentuation of the informational structure of lectures is regarded as an indicator of the speaker’s language culture.
This research was conducted within the framework of academic style. The relevance of this article is because currently the issues of the culture of the studied foreign language, including the culture of the spoken language, are of particular importance in the context of globalization, when English became the language of international communication, which operates on the territories of countries with different cultural traditions. The identification of the British norm of linguistic culture is presented in this article on the example of the prosody of the information structure of lectures.
So, the conducted audit analysis of quasi-spoken speech of texts of academic style in British and American lecturers’ implementation allowed the author to draw the following conclusions: 1) the sociocultural characteristics of the speaker largely determine the culture of his/her speech behavior; 2) accentuation, being a particular manifestation of the category of emphasis and performing the function of the logical organization of the utterance, can serve as an indicator of the complexity of thinking; 3) the rhythmic pattern of the experimental sounding material corresponds to generally accepted data – 1:2 for the British version and 1:1.3 for the American one; 4) the most frequent are emphatic patterns having the ratio of stressed syllables to unstressed equal to 1: 1; 1: 1.3; 1: 2.