Emotiveness’ Means in Speech: Prosody and Syntax

This study focuses on emotions in speech. The aim of this study was to identify syntactic and prosodic means of spontaneous speech produced in a negative emotional situation. The object of study is the system of speech sounds. The subject of research is syntactic and prosodic features of speech that reflect the emotional state of a person. A complex methodology was used: the method of theoretical analysis, the descriptive method, the survey method (questionnaire) and the method of phonetic experiment. This paper consists of an introduction, two chapters, a conclusion and a list of used sources. The Chapter 1 describes theoretical aspect of emotions, the degree of knowledge on the category of emotiveness in Russian language and the means of expression of emotiveness on phonetic and syntactic levels of Russian language. The Chapter 2 describes a phonetic experiment performed in the PRAAT program. The Chapter 2 also contains the results of the survey conducted in determining the size of an experimental sample (23 fragments of speech, 13 people). The results of the experiment are following: the most frequent syntactic structures that are contained in emotive utterances produced in negative emotional situations, were 1)articulatory pauses; 2)rhetorical questions; 3)several types of repetitions; 4)invective elliptical constructions; 5)sentence inversions; 6) hypothetical composite syntactic whole tearings. On the phonetic level, the following changes occur in negative emotional situations: 1)the average pitch frequency value increases; 2)the pitch frequency bandwidth value also increases; 3)the average value of intensity increases; 4) the intensity bandwidth value increases; 5)the total rate of speech is higher in a neutral emotional situation.