On Tenor and its Prosodic Markers in Rhetorical Discourse

Abstract

In rhetorical discourse, tenors can be formed intentionally and used as rhetorical strategies to implement the speaker's goals. The article reports on a study of the contextual category 'tenor' and its prosodic realisation in rhetorical discourse. The paper examines rhetorical, auditory and acoustic features in the samples of English academic presentations (lectures). The author argues that tenors can reflect both the relationships of the participants of a particular speech event and the relationships associated with a broader sociocultural context. Analysing tenor as a sociocultural phenomenon the author demonstrates its correlations with some specific features of British speech culture. Special attetnion is given to the role of prosody in conveying and identifying tenors. The article contains an overview of the prosodic markers of tenor: tone of voice, pitch parameters, temporal characteristics. The study of tenor and its prosodic markers contributes to a fuller understanding of the influence of contextual factors on the prosodic realisation of discourse. The observations made in the paper may be useful to develop crosscultural communication competence and rhetorical competence of EFL students.Keywords: tenor of discourse, rhetorical strategy, prosodic markers, tone of voice, irony, cross-cultural communication The shift to a discourse perspective in the research of prosody, on the one hand, and the incorporation of prosody into discourse analysis, on the other hand, have provided a deeper insight into the social and interactional meaning of speech communication. Prosodic means are studied with regard to their functions in speech communication as well as situational and contextual factors. This complex interaction of prosody and context is reflected in tenor, a communication phenomenon linking spoken discourse and extralinguistic context.The significance of tenor as a contextual category is generally acknowledged. Some attention is given to tenor in the studies of language variation and style (Copland, 2007), discourse theory (Karasik, 2009), sociolinguistics (Downes, 1998;Schevchenko, 2015). Interestingly, all the researchers interested in tenor tend to comment on the importance of the vocal component. However, the prosodic markers of tenor are seldom included in the analysis.The goal of this research is to describe tenor as a contextual category in rhetorical discourse with regard to its prosodic realisation. It should also be noted that the research was aimed at establishing tenor variations and tenor shifts within a particular genre of discourse. Academic public speeches (lectures) were selected as the material for the analysis, because this genre of rhetorical discourse is generally associated with a certain tenor. The observations presented here are meant to demonstrate that the tenor in academic presentations is neither fixed nor homogeneous. Material and MethodsThe material for the analysis was the corpus of 20 lectures (Moscow Pedagogical State University (MPGU) Corpus of Spoken English, 2015) deliver...

Dialogue Strategies In English Lectures And Their Prosodic Realisation

“…In such cases we observe the change of the form of communication, which is generally accompanied by the change of register (or tenor shift) (Freydina, 2016). Stories with embedded dialogues contribute to a more effective speaker-audience interaction by reducing the effect of inattention, especially if the story contains humour and irony.…”