MELODIC CONTOUR OF TEXTS READ OUT ALOUD IN REGIONAL VARIANTS OF MODERN GERMAN

Abstract

The article identifies and describes suprasegmental features of the phonetic division of German texts read out aloud. The study is based on German regional variants in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The auditory analysis of prosodic feature modifications related to the phonetic division of German texts made by native speakers was conducted at the University of Bonn (Germany), where authentic German texts were listened to in three variants of modern German in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The article analyzes various factors that cause the prosodic and semantic variation of the addressee’s and addresser’s verbal behavior within discourse. In addition, it reveals the deep mechanism that enables speech invariants and variants to function in different languages. The conclusions help comprehend how a person carries out the multi-channel processing of speech information while listening to someone’s speech. Focusing on the problem of the melodic contour helped identify such regional variants of the German literary language as West German, East German and Swiss.