The Kyiv School of Phonetics

The Kyiv School of Phonetics, founded in 2003, consists of 3 Doctors of Philology, 21Candidates of Philology and6post-graduate students. The School carries out research within the framework of a brand new speech energetics theory as an interdisciplinary approach to the study of phonetic phenomena, whose conceptual and methodological grounds were elaborated by the School leader – Alla Kalyta.

A set of problems, studied within the scope of speech energetic theory by representatives of the Kyiv School of Phonetics, embraces the following issues:

1) energetics of written ororal speech manifestation;

2)energetics of communicants’ instinctive neuromuscular activities;

3)energetics of communicants’ psycho-physiological processes of speaking-and-thinking and thinking-and-speaking activities;

4) segmental and suprasegmental means’ interplay;

5) text and discourse intonation;

6) interaction of music and speech;

7) prosodic characteristics of different personalities’ speech;

8) oral English spoken by Ukrainians;

9) interference of the Ukrainian sound system into the English one;

10) speech tempo-rhythm;

11) intonation manipulative potential;

12) sound means’ subliminal effect on the recipient;

13) the role of phonosemantic and phonostylistic means in realizing the utterance meaning;

14) oral speech emotional and pragmatic potentials and prosodic means of their realization;

15) cognitive aspect of intonation;

16) rhythmic organization of poetic texts;

17) prosodic means conveying positive and negative emotions.

The School representatives developed and substantiated a number of new techniquesand methods of experimental research of speech energetics.

1. The development of a comprehensive methodology of interdisciplinary experimental phonetic studies with the use of systemic matrices for registration of primary data obtained as a result of perceptual and acoustic analysis, served as a starting point of speech energetics experimental research.

2. To solve the problem of quantitative measurement of the level of utterance emotional-and-pragmatic potential as well as to define a differential scale of evaluation of experimental phonetic study of speech energetic phenomena (A. Kalyta, L.Taranenko) we theoretically substantiated the dimensionless quantitative K-criterion and experimentally established the intervals of its values, defining the levels of emotional-and-pragmatic potential of utterance actualization.

3. We formed graphical models of energy-grams, including intono-, picto-, emotional and pragma-grams, that reflect the dynamics of a complex interaction of energetic, linguistic and paralinguistic factors in the process of speech prosodic organization.

4. Wedeveloped (A.Kalyta, O.Klimeniuk) a methodology for the analyses of the strategy of the utterance subliminal-and-communicative impact on the recipient.

5. Proceeding from thepostulation of a direct connection between (1) the processes of pauses generation andthe speaker’s consciousness, subconscious and unconscious, (2) the ability of speech pauses’ psycho-physiological energy to excite the acts of cognitive thinking in the listener’s consciousness as well as (3) considering the presence of the latent manipulative-and-subliminal potential in pauses, we (A.Kalyta) deduced the dimensionless criterion of a pausal jump of emotional-and-pragmatic potential of the adjacent speech segments. This criterion allows one to give a quantitative assessment of the effect of weakening or strengthening of the emotional-and-pragmatic potential of the speech segment, preceding the pause, upon the next speech segment, which immediately indicates the subliminal influence / non-influence of a pause on triggering the recipient’s cognitive mechanisms.

6. We introduced the notion of phonoconcept (A.Kalyta) defined as a specific cognitive entity, formed on the basis of a person’s communicative experience, that comprises a content minimum of knowledge, and is capable (1) of being stored in an individual’s long-term memory in the form of a sound image or symbol as well as (2) of being reproduced in speech with the help of definite phonetic structures.

7. We advanced a hypothetical assumption that the individual’s phonoconcept sphere represents a set of archetypal phonoconcept-prototypes, within the scope of which there is a definite number of phonoconcepts-analogues, associatively related to the phonoconcept-prototype. These phonoconcepts-analogues actually form the phonoconcepts thesaurus, or perceptual basis of the language.

8. We substantiated the synergetic model of phonoconcept generation and self-development taking place in the processes of production and decoding the utterance meaning by the communicants.