On 14 February 2019, Iryna Oleksandrivna Andrushchenko defended her Candidate dissertation, “Prosodic characteristics of the public speech of accentuated personalities (an experimental phonetic study based on English)”, at Kyiv National Linguistic University.
The official opponents were Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor O. R. Valihura, and Candidate of Philological Sciences, Associate Professor V. Yu. Parashchuk. Congratulations to Iryna Andrushchenko and her supervisor, Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor Alla Andriivna Kalyta, on the successful defence.
The study proposes an innovative experimental phonetic method for investigating intonational features of politicians’ public speech from a psycholinguistic perspective, taking into account their dominant character accentuations. The lively, positive discussion at the defence demonstrated the relevance of the research and the interest of leading Ukrainian specialists in Germanic linguistics. The work adds another distinctive study to the research of the Kyiv Phonetic School under Professor Kalyta’s supervision.
Abstract, from page 18 of the dissertation abstract: the dissertation studies prosodic characteristics of the public speech of accentuated personalities using inaugural and policy speeches by American presidents and British prime ministers from the second half of the twentieth century.
The study identifies four types of character accentuation among the politicians examined: demonstrative, stuck, pedantic and excitable. It establishes invariant and variant prosodic models of their public speech.
