Auditory and acoustic analyses of English jokes establish the energetic characteristics of their prosodic organisation. Their oral actualisation is described through the fundamental principle of conserving an utterance’s emotional and pragmatic potential, which underpins the energetic theory of speech and its coordinates of emotion, pragmatics and meaning. Two variants of an algorithmic plot model are substantiated to account for the interaction of emotional, pragmatic, semantic and structural factors: one resembles a fairy tale (introduction → commentary → coda), and the other a riddle (topic → commentary → coda). Traditional linguistic interpretation of experimental phonetic results establishes an invariant intonation model, whose parameters are described within the structural plot components and at their junctures.
The quantitative K-criterion is used to construct a typical energy-gram of a joke. The analysis shows low emotional and pragmatic potential in initial plot elements; in the coda, pragmatic potential rises into the high zone while emotional potential reaches the lower zone of the medium level. Semantic contrasts increase these potentials and become actualisers of textual meaning through their prosodic highlighting.
Keywords: English joke, structural components, plot elements, auditory and acoustic analysis, prosodic means, invariant intonation model, K-criterion, emotional and pragmatic potential, energy-gram.
Original title: Просодичні засоби актуалізації емоційно-прагматичного потенціалу тексту англійського анекдоту
Authors: Л. І. Тараненко
