A COMMON BASIS OF COMPARISON AND PARAMETRIC MODEL OF PARALINGUISTIC PORTRAIT FEATURES

Abstract

The paper tackles the contrastive linguoculturological description of paralinguistic means of the literary portrait, still very insufficiently studied in the context of the English–Russian language pair despite the increasing research into verbalised non-verbal behaviour. The goals of the paper are to establish a universal paralinguistic taxonomy which can be applied as an operational tertium comparationis, and to illustrate a parametric model, under which any text or character will be a vector of compositional relative frequencies over parameters of the taxonomy. As the material we use are early twentieth-century social novels A. N.Tolstoy’s Sisters (1,834 instances annotated for paralinguistic meanings) and J. Galsworthy’s The Man of Property (1,023 instances), both analysed within a common three-level taxonomy, consisting of two top-level groups, five middle and thirty-six lower-level parameters. The dissimilarity was estimated using the log-likelihood keyness, chi-square with Cramer’s V and Pearson residuals, cosine similarity and Jensen–Shannon divergence, and hierarchical clustering. The two portrait profiles are shown to be very similar in general, but reliable differences in their phonetic and auditory or visual and kinesic components are established – the Russian portrait is phonational-auditory and based on voice qualities, whereas the English portrait is visual-kinesic, dominated by body motion and face/eye description. The cluster profiles support the text-bounded selection in Russian/English character portraits. Thus, the tertium comparationis is successfully operationalised, and universal and idio-ethnic levels of the portrait description are discriminated.