PROSODIC ARRANGEMENT OF ENGLISH AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE DISCOURSE

Abstract

The paper deals with the research of an extralinguistic category of gender on the material of autobiographies as a type of narrative discourse. Gender is analyzed as a social and cultural construct disregard the biological sex. In the present research narrative is interpreted as a specific for a man form of living, consisting of verbal reconstruction of situations which took place in the past. Narrative plays an important role in the comprehension by a man/ woman his/her own personality, because people are the stories they tell. Narrative has dynamic nature as the life is open in time and a man identifies himself with the brightest reminiscences of his past. Like narrative, the life is exposed to the future allowing an individual to estimate possible prospects concerning the past. Thus, narrative built round the changes in the structure of personality is the subject of our interest. The experimental material comprises the audio recordings of autobiographies of Camilla, Duchess of Lochmar, Bill Cole, Jane Burton, James O'Neill, David Niven and Professor Michael Chriss of total sounding of 120 min. The aim of the work is to define the parameters of verbal narration in the genre of reminiscences at lexico-syntactic and intonational level and to distinguish the way women and men identify themselves in an autobiography. The analysis reveals some principles of the reconstruction of the past represented by speakers in chronological order: 1) characteristic syntactic structure; 2) narrative canvas created by actional verbs in a certain sequence; 3) morphological descriptions (the use of Past Indefinite and Present Historic); 4) specific type of links. The parameters reflected in the autobiographies are the following: description of gender, exterior, age, social status, traits of character, family state, time and place of action, etc. The auditory analysis conducted by the authors, experts in phonology, allows to make the conclusion that differences in manner of self presentation are observed on the phonetic level as well.