Ways of expressing emotions at the Academy Awards Ceremony: diachronic analysis

Pereviazko D. Ways of expressing emotions at the Academy Awards Ceremony: diachronic analysis : bachelor’s thesis : 035 Philology / supervised by O. Prygodiy. Kyiv, 2025. 73 p.

The thesis examines verbal and non-verbal modes of emotional expression displayed at the ceremony of the Academy Awards through diachronic linguistic analysis spanning five decades (1976-2025). The research examines the evolution of emotional speech in public speaking, analyzing the Oscar winners’ acceptance speech, a specific affective genre of communication, which reflects social and cultural changes of emotional expression standards.
The first chapter sets out the theoretical foundations of emotional research in linguistics, including the categorization of emotions, paradigms to measure positive and negative factors, non-verbal components, and gender-specific patterns of affective communication. The second chapter provides an empirical analysis of 100 Oscar acceptance speeches, evenly split between two different time intervals (1976-2000 and 2001-2025) and evenly distributed with regard to gender representation.
The findings point to a significant cultural shift toward more vivid, spontaneous affective engagement and away from repressed, formalized expressions of emotion. Contemporary oratory demonstrates an increase in syntactic complexity, heightened degrees of expressiveness, and more frequent use of intensifiers. A gender analysis detects a movement toward a convergence of emotional styles, as traditional gender differences slowly diminish across time, with men increasingly adopting more open and personal forms of emotional communication. The multimodal analysis shows that emotional meanings expressed through Oscar speeches result from the rich interaction between lexical choices, prosodic features, face, bodily movement, and other embodied resources, all of them combining to transcend the simple verbal expression of emotion.