Olha Serhiivna Sokyrska successfully defended her Candidate of Philological Sciences dissertation at Kherson State University on 22 June. We warmly congratulate her and her supervisor, Larysa Ivanivna Taranenko, and wish her further productive linguistic research and discoveries.
The dissertation is entitled “Sociolinguistic features of the prosodic organization of refusal (an experimental phonetic study based on English)”.
Abstract: the dissertation investigates sociolinguistic features of the functioning and interaction of prosodic means of expressing refusal in English dialogic speech. It proposes a model of the mechanisms for encoding and decoding refusal meaning, a classification of refusal tactics, and a classification of the main linguistic features of different kinds and types of refusal utterances. These provide a basis for analysing and systematizing the functional, structural and sociolinguistic characteristics that determine their prosodic organization.
A scheme of possible reasons for the generation of particular classes of refusal in the addressee’s consciousness is substantiated. Auditory and acoustic analysis then describes variant intonation models of English refusal utterances in each class.
Experiments establish an invariant intonation model and the distinguishing features of its variants, described according to speakers’ high, middle and low sociocultural levels.
Keywords: English refusal utterances; dialogic speech; sociocultural levels; classes of reasons for refusal generation; emotional and pragmatic potential; prosodic means; auditory and acoustic analysis; invariant and variant intonation models.
