PROFESSIONAL ACTOR READING AS INTERPRETATION OF THE AUTHOR’S CONCEPTION

PROFESSIONAL ACTOR READING AS INTERPRETATION OF THE AUTHOR’S CONCEPTION

Author:  T.Е. Yanko

Affiliation:  Russian Academy of Sciences

Abstract: 
The prosody of professional actor reading has been viewed from the perspective of the cognitive process of recognizing the conception of the author by the addressee. The analysis is based on the records of “The Captain’s Daughter” (A. Pushkin), “Anna Karenina” (L. Tolstoy), and the stories by I. Babel voiced over by I. Smoktunovskiy, O. Tabakov, Z. Gerdt, N. Marton, and V. Gerassimov. The instrumental study has been carried out by using Speech Analyzer, the computer system of oral speech analysis. The prosody of the sentence-initial noun phrases designating the new information is analyzed. The sentence-initial placement of the new object is not characteristic of the spontaneous Russian. For instance, the sentence Ljubopytstvo menja muchilo ‘The curiosity was bothering me’ from Pushkin has as its basic word order the sequence Menja muchilo liubopytstvo ‘I was burning with curiosity’. However, in fiction the sentence-initial position of the object existing / appearing on the scene can be regarded as a specific technique making the sentence more expressive and dynamic. The prosodic analysis demonstrates that the communicative function of the sentence-initial noun phrase is subject to the pragmatic context and the lexical structure of the initial noun phrase. A variety of functions can be displayed by the sentence-initial noun phrase: the function of the focus proper of a sentence, the emphatic focus, the topic, and the emphatic topic. The instrumental analysis of the sentence prosody shows that the prosodic strategies used by various readers are very often identical. The coincidence of the reading strategies employed by different readers brings to the hypothesis that these strategies realize the communicative conception of the author.

Keywords:  professional actor reading as interpretation of the author’s conception interpretation, fiction, communicative structure, prosody, topic-focus structure, word order, voicing over