SCIENTIFIC SERIES
“COGNITIVE STUDIES OF LANGUAGE”
Author: Yanko T.E.
Affiliation: Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences
Abstract: The paper aims at analyzing the prosodic patterns of Joseph Brodsky’s reading poetry. The analysis of sounding poetry is based on the principles elaborated for the analysis of the ordinary spoken speech. The style of reciting practiced by Brodsky is based on all linguistic obligatory prosodic means (i.e. grammatical means) being un-used: Brodsky does not employ either the markers of the topic-focus articulation, or the prosody of the coherent speech. He only monotonously marks 1) each phonetic word of the text, and 2) the end of the poem. The pause also is not used by Brodsky to designate the speech segmenting but solely to take a breath. The end of a piece of poetry within Brodsky’s system of performance is used to distinguish a poem (or a completed part of a poem) as an elementary poetic unit. In this paper, the style of Brodsky is systematically compared with Brodsky’s poetry read by M. Kozakov. Kozakov, on the contrary, is very precise in using all linguistic prosodic means of segmenting speech. For investigation, a minor working corpus of recordings was set up. The software program Praat is used in the process of analyzing the sounding data. The results presented in this paper are exemplified by frequency tracings of both Brodsky’s and Kozakov’s readings.
Keywords: poetry, reading, prosody, Brodsky, Kozakov, topic, focus, cognition, discourse, techniques, Praat
References:
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Янко Т.Е. Просодия религиозного дискурса: «Отче наш» и “Рater noster” // Ритуал в языке и коммуникации / отв. ред. и сост. Л.Л. Федорова. М.: ЯСК, РГГУ, 2013. С. 287-301.
Янко Т.Е. Просодия речевого акта vs. просодия речевого жанра // Речевые жанры современного общения. М., 2015.
Pages: 173-183