SYNTAXIC ORGANIZATION OF THE AMERICAN STANDUP AS A REFLECTION OF THE SPEAKER’S GENDER

Abstract

The present work looks at the structural and communicative peculiarities of TED Talks, a modern hybrid genre that combines features of the official public speaking, stand-up comedy, storytelling, and scientific and educational discourse. The syncretic nature of the genre determines specifics of the communicative techniques that speakers choose to achieve maximum effectiveness of their speech.Besides, this form of information presentation reflects general social trends as to personalization of the message and emotional involvement of the audience. The research focuses on the comparative analysis of speeches on various topics, performed by six stand-up comedians (three men and three women) studied through the prism of their gender. The objective of study study is to identify the typical communicative models of the speakers, the general syntactic organization of their speeches in terms of establishing the specific weight of sentences that differ in their surface structure and communicative orientation, and also to highlight lingual means that contribute to increasing informativeness, expressiveness, and emotional impact on the audience. The work considers the frequency of use of simple and complex sentences. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the gender specificity of the syntactic organization of speech, which allows us to trace how the speaker’s gender affects the choice of linguosyntactic communicative techniques and the general rhetorical structure of the speech. A special study was undertaken to clarify the concepts of manipulation and suggestion, which stand-up comedians resort to in their public speaking within the framework of TED Talks as an element of the cultural tradition of the United States. Thus, the study combines cultural-communicative, surface-syntactic, and gender approaches to analyzing the discourse of contemporary American stand-up. The results of the study will contribute to a better understanding of the role of speech mechanisms (especially syntactic variation of information encoding in a message) in the formation of effective gendermarked public speech.