Melodic organization of the preacher's speech in film discourse

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MELODIC ORGANIZATION OF THE PREACHER'S SPEECH IN FILM DISCOURSE

Shevchenko S.

postgraduate student, Odesa I.I. Mechnikov national university

Key words: melodic organization, preachers' speech, speech behaviour, film discourse

МЕЛОДІЙНА ОРГАНІЗАЦІЯ МОВЛЕННЯ ПРОПОВІДНИКА У ЗОБРАЖУВАЛЬНОМУ ХУДОЖНЬОМУ ДИСКУРСІ

Шевченко С.С.

аспірант, Одеський національний університет імені І. І. Мечникова

На підставі аудиторського аналізу, по-перше, було підтверджено просодичні відмінності між трьома мовленнєвими реалізаціями на рівні сприйняття, по-друге, було виявлено, що мелодійний компонент інтонації є другим за інформативністю компонентом, що бере участь у диференціації мовлення й у посиленні його впливового ефекту.

Комплексний слуховий та інструментальний аналіз мелодичних характеристик промови проповідників дозволяє зробити висновок про наявність інтегральних і відмінних мелодійних параметрів, притаманних трьом типам мовленнєвої поведінки мовців під час проповіді, виступів поза церквою та розмов з парафіянами. Приватна розмова священиків із парафіянами характеризується найнижчими мелодійними показниками, адже на перший план виступають міміка та кінетичні засоби виразності й емоційності.

Ключові слова: мелодична організація, мовлення священика, мовленнєва поведінка, кінодискурс

Introduction

Religious discourse is of considerable interest in terms of studying the rhetorical features of its genres. In this regard, the study of religious sermons, speeches and conversations on religious topics determines the relevance of this article. The aim of the research is to identify the peculiarities of the melodic organization of monological expressions of preachers of different ranks - the characters of English-language feature films. In accordance with the goal, the following tasks have been solved:

- to consider the features of religious discourse in general and preaching in particular from the standpoint of their inherent specific features;

- to characterize the melodic means of realization of the preacher's speech at the perceptual level;

- to identify melodic parameters that participate in the implementation of the studied utterances on the basis of instrumental analysis of fundamental frequency intonation characteristics;

- to compare melodic characteristics of preachers' speech in different communicative situations - during church sermons, speeches outside the church, private conversations with parishioners on the basis of integral and differential prosodic features of the studied utterances.

The object of research is the spiritual-educational (preaching, instructive) discourse in the context of its accompanying extralingual factors reflected in English -language feature films. The subject of the study is the melodic organization of the preacher's speech, reflected in English-language feature films, which consists of the priest's speech behaviour in various communicative situations.

Materials and methods

The material of the research is the texts of oral English sermons, speeches and private conversations of priests, removed from 5 modern English feature films, in which the main or secondary character is a clergyman. The total amount of speech material is 25 A4 pages, 14 Times New Roman font of written transcription of oral text (96 minutes of audio speech). To achieve this goal, both general and special linguistic research methods are used in the work. Within the framework of general scientific methods, a descriptive method is involved to identify a set of characteristic features of the object of study; methods of analysis and synthesis were used to form generalized ideas about the nature of English religious discourse; quantitative analysis was used to highlight the internal and external dynamics of the subject. Among the special phonetic methods the auditive analysis was used, which provided an opportunity to identify subjectively perceived prosodic characteristics of speech, while instrumental analysis was used to describe the objective physical characteristics of the studied speech realization s and their interpretation.

Results and discussion

Until now, purely linguistic analysis of religious texts has been on the periphery of scientific research of Ukrainian linguists. Issues of language and religion were mainly considered from historical, cultural, sociological and religious points of view, while abroad the sermon was actively studied from the standpoint of compositional structure and lexical-syntactic content, and in terms of its rhetorical orientation and foundations of effective communication. Foreign studies of sermons from the standpoint of homiletics as a section of rhetoric are represented by the works of F. Creddock, J. Minz, D. Braga, H. Robbinson. Their works serve as a guide to all stages of preaching.

In the works of D. Buttrick (1987) and S. Killinger (1996), sermon is understood as a special genre, which is characterized by a specific structure and special means of lingual expression. In the works of G. Adams (1986) and N. Kravchenko (2017; 2020), preaching is explored as an integral part of worship, its place and task in religious communication. D. Crystal (1965) in the work "Language and Religion" highlighted the issue of place of religion in the life of the British and analyzed the socio-cultural factors influencing the manner of the preacher's language. The central participant in preaching discourse is the clergyman - bishop, presbyter, deacon, abbot, etc., who can act as a "performer of a certain role - preacher, clergyman; he is also the bearer (not in his own name, but only as a "transagent" between God and a man) of the highest knowledge, wisdom, on the one hand, given to man by the Almighty, and on the other hand, the experience gained by human society over millennia (Robinson 1980: 57). The study of the sermon as a kind of public speech is of great interest, because in the professional activity of the priest much of the time is spent on verbal communication, so his sermons are one of the main tools for the audience. Since the sermon is, above all, a sounding text, it seems that prosody plays a key role in its effectiveness and success in the audience. Traditionally, in all phonetic studies, auditive analysis is one of the stages of a comprehensive study. The purpose of auditive analysis in this paper is to identify perceived prosodic information that will be sufficient for adequate analysis of intonation features of oral English sermons, speeches and conversations at the perceptual level. Auditive analysis is the next stage after perceptual analysis, which consists of a preliminary linguistic analysis and is conducted by the researcher. The researcher has the task of distinguishing from the general text those phrase units that most clearly demonstrate the prosodic characteristics in all parts of the studied sermons, speeches and conversations. The auditive analysis was attended by 10 auditors - graduate students and teachers of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Phonetics of English. The auditive analysis consisted of 2 stages. At the first stage, the auditors were asked to identify:

- to which of the types of speeches (church sermon, speech outside the church, conversation with parishioners) belong the utterances they heard;

- to which part of the speech the listened fragments belong;

- the degree of participation of certain prosodic parameters (melodic contour, phrasal stress, volume, tempo, rhythm, pause) in the realization of the intention of speech and expression of emotions in different parts of the text.

At the second stage of the auditive analysis, the auditors assessed the main characteristic intonation features of the studied speech texts of the clergymen (personages of the film): volume, pitch, tempo. The estimation of the auditive analysis data was systematized and used for further linguistic assessment of the peculiarities of the melodic organization of the texts of the speeches of the characters of the films - priests - in the film discourse.

The results of the auditors' determination of the types of speeches (church sermons, speeches outside the church, conversations with parishioners) of the statements they heard, showed that all the auditors identified the belonging of the segment to one of the three types of speech. First of all, this applies to the introductory and concluding part of the traditional church sermon, where all the auditors in all the listened sections recognized this type of speech realization. In our opinion, this is due to the special prosodic pattern of this type of speech activity, namely - a particularly solemn way of pronouncing, raising and/or expressing all prosodic means - pitch, volume, tempo, rhythm, timbre, as well as orderly syntactic structure of utterances contained in the sermon. In addition, such a high percentage of recognition of traditional church sermons is due to the presence in the introductory part of a quote from the Bible, which is delivered by a preacher with a special prosodic pattern. At the second stage of the auditive analysis, the auditors assessed the main characteristic intonation features of the studied speech texts of the characters of the films - priests - in the film discourse: tempo, volume, pitch. Since this article focuses on the melodic organization of the priest's speech in various communicative situations, we will focus on elucidating the results of data processing of this prosodic parameter. According to the auditors' answers, the melodic component is the second most informative component of intonation, which involves changing the pitch of the preachers' voice in different parts of the text. The results of the analysis of auditors' responses to the identification of the pitch level of utterances are presented in Table 1.

Table 1 Auditors' determination of the preachers' voice pitch level of the speech (%)

According to the data presented in Table 1, the auditors generally noted the predominant use of medium pitch, which is the norm for English pronunciation. However, the auditors' answers made it possible to identify a common tendency to use high and low pitch levels in different parts of the text. Thus, the final part of the sermon and speech is characterized by the deviation of speakers from the normal pitch level in the direction of both high and low level. Thus, the final part of the sermon and speech is characterized by a marked deviation of the speakers from the normal pitch level towards both high and low pitch levels. Such a contrasting melodic organization of the semantically important part of the church sermon and speech outside the church gives more emotional tension to the utterance and, as a result, leads to a convincing effect.

To obtain objective data on the nature of changes in the melodic characteristics of the preachers' speech in three implementations, electroacoustic analysis was performed on the following fundamental frequency parameters: maximum values of the frequency of the fundamental tone in the phrase; maximum values of the fundamental frequency in the superphrasal unity; the maximum value of the frequency of the fundamental tone in the text of the speech (sermons, conversations) in general; frequency range of phrases that make up the supra-phrasal unity of speech (sermons, conversations). One of the means of convincing speech realization in the studied utterances is to increase the pitch of the voice, which can be instrumentally recorded as increasing the frequency level of the fundamental tone. The results of calculations of the frequency of the fundamental tone are shown in Table 2.

Table 2 Average values of maximum frequency (Hz) in sermons, speeches and conversations

Analyzing the data obtained, it should be noted that the maximum values of frequency in the sermon generally exceed the corresponding in sp eech and conversation, but there is a common tendency for all three types of discourses in distribution of frequency maxima within the text. All types of discourse are characterized by a significant increase in pitch in the final part and in the introduction, which is expressed in the values of the maximums of frequency in these parts of the text, which are much higher than the average in the text. First of all, this applies to the sermon, where the average maximum values of the frequency in the final part is 391 Hz, with the average value of this parameter in the text being 339Hz. In private conversation, this difference from the average text is less significant (324Hz in the introduction, 319 Hz in the final part, 292 Hz in the average), but nevertheless, the maximum values of frequency are also recorded in the final and introductory parts.

A comparative analysis of the values of the frequency ranges of phrases that make up the supra-phrase unity (SPU) of sermon texts, conversations and speeches, showed that in general the largest values of this parameter are also characterized by phrases-components of SPU texts of sermons. Comparing the data in Table 3, obtained by processing the values of the frequency range of SPU of different parts of the sermon, speech and conversation with the maximum values of frequency, we can see that in general the values of the frequency range depend on its upper limit. However, in some cases, the expansion of the range is due to lowering the lower limit of frequency, and narrowing - due to increasing the lower limit of frequency at fairly high values of its maxima.

Table 3 The average values of the frequency range of the phrases of the SPU components of different parts of the sermon, speech and conversation