Territorial varieties of English pronunciation

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 887.

Plan

Phonostylistics

1. Problems and tasks of phonostylistics

2. Style-forming factors

3. The problem of classification of phonetic styles

4. Informational style

5. Academic style

Much of what people say depends directly or indirectly on the situation they are in. On the one hand, variations of language in different situations are various and numerous but, on the other hand, all these varieties have much in common as they are realisations of the same system. That means that there are regular patterns of variation in language, or in other words, language means which constitute any utterance are characterised by a certain pattern of selection and arrangement.

The principles of this selection and arrangement, the ways of combining the elements form what is called “the style”. Style integrates language means constructing the utterance, and at the same time differs one utterance from another. The variations in language use can be studied on three levels: phonetic, lexical and grammatical. The first level is the area of phonostylistics.The aim of phonostylistics is to analyse all possible kinds of spoken utterances with the main purpose of identifying the phonetic features, both segmental and suprasegmental, which are restricted to certain kinds of contexts, to explain why such features have been used and to classify them into categories based upon a view of their function.

Before describing phonetic style-forming factors it is necessary to explain what is meant by extralinguistic situation. The analysis shows that it can be defined by three components, that is purpose, participants and setting. These components distinguish situation as the context within which interaction (communication) occurs. Thus a speech situation can be defined by the co-occurance of two or more interlocutors related to each other in a particular way, having a particular aim of communication, communicating about a particular topic in a particular setting.

Firstly, a situation is connected with the purpose and the topic of the communication. Purpose can be defined as the motor which sets the chassis of setting and participants together, it is interlinked with the other two components in a very intricate way. The purpose derects the activities of the participants throughout a situation to complete a task. Such purposes can be viewed in terms of general activity types. There appear to be a considerable number of quite general types of activities like working, teaching, learning, conducting a meeting, chatting, playing a game and others. Such activity types are socially recognized as units of interaction that are identifiable. Academic activities are opposed to other groups of activity types. One of the bases of such an opposition might be the degree of spontaneity or degree of preparedness of speech that would reveal clusters of pronunciation markers. Activity type specifies the range of possible purposes that is required. The notion of purpose needs the specification of contents at a more detailed level than that of activity type. This we sall call “sudject matter” or “topic”. It should be pointed out that subject matter determines mostly the lexical items, the pronunciation being slightly affected.

Another component of situation is participants. Speech varies with participants in numerous ways. It is a marker of various characteristics of the individual speakers as well as of relationships between participants. Characteristics of individuals may be divided into those of an individual and those of a member of a significant social grouping. The characteristics of social relationships are of primary importance. Thus we differentiate occupational and non-occupational roles, age of participants is also an important category for social interaction. Among other things age is associated with the role structure in the family and in social groups, with the assignment of authority and status. The speech behaviour of a person not only conveys information about his or her own age but also about the listener or the receiver of the verbal message. Thus old people speak and are spoken to in a different way from young people. For example, an elderly person usually speaks in a high-pitched voice, people generally use higher pitch-levels speaking to younger children. The sex of the speaker is also included into the “participants” component of a speech situation. There is a consistent tendency for women to produce more standard or rhetorically correct pronunciation which is generally opposed to the omission of certain speech sounds. Female speakers use a more “polite” pattern of assertive intonation while male speakers use a more deliberate pattern; women tend to use certain intonation patterns (high fall-rise) that men usually do not. The emotional state of the speaker at the moment of speech production which is likely to reveal pronunciation markers which would be a fascinating problem of reseach also needs consideration.

One more component of extralinguistic situation is called setting or scene. It is defined by several features. The first of them is a physical orientation of participants which is to some extent determined by the activity they are engaged in. Thus scenes may be arranged along dimentions: public – private, impersonal – personal, polite – casual, high-cultured – low-cultured. There is also one bipolar dimension of formal – informal. The kind of language appropriate to the formal scenes is defferentiated from that appropriate to those informal. High forms of language share certain properties, such as elaboration of syntax and lexicon, phonological precision and rhythmicality, whereas “low” forms share properties including elipsis, repetition, speed and slurring.

According to the data obtained due to special investigation, a number of factors which result in phonostylistic varieties are singed out. They are:

1. the purpose, or the aim of the utterance;

2. the speaker's attitude;

3. the form of communication;

4. the degree of formality;

5. the degree of preparedness, or the reference of the oral text to a written one.

The purpose of the utterance may be called a phonetic style-forming factor. All other factors cause modifications within this style may be referred to as style-modifying factors. All these factors are interdependent and interconnected. In terms of phonostylistics we may analyse various phonetic ways of realisation the aim more effective. The language may be used for persuasion, teaching, advertising, amusing, controlling and other purposes, according to which the speaker selects a number of functional phonetic means. Any oral text is addressee-oriented.

The form of communication can be a monologue or a dialogue. Monologue excludes the possibility of interruption by others while dialogue requires the participation of others. Monologues are more extended and characterised by more phonetic, lexical and grammatical cohesion.

The formality of situation implies the recognition of social roles and relationship. An individual may possess a certain rank in an organization and hence be addressed in one way his subordinates, in another way by his equals (peers) and in a third way by his superiors. It suggests that a language user possesses the ability to speak in different styles. It is the case with people whose professions are highly verbal ones. Such people usually have a very cultural background. In the opposite case the linguistic behaviour of a speaker in a formal situation does not differ from his behaviour in an informal situation.We might say that styles of speaking differ mainly in sounds. In a formal situation the language user tends to make his speech distinct, thorough and precise. The notion of the appropriateness of speaking slow is part of the cultural code which insists that it is rude to talk fast and less explicit in such situation. In an informal situation he would prefer less explicit and more rapid form because this form would be more appropriate and would function efficiently as a mode of communication. There are not only two varieties of pronunciation. There are, certainly, many more of them and they have no definable boundaries. The two polar varieties that have been mentioned above illustrate the role of degree of formality as an extralinguistic category.

The quantity of addressees is another factor which is often referred to as the one concerning degree of formality. Speech is qualified as public when a speaker is listened to by a group of people. Non-public communication occurs in face-to-face situations. Still there are no direct correlations between the formality of situation and public – non-public charecter of presentation. Linguistic realization of the formality on both segmental and suprasegmental levels is very important for a student of another language. A foreigner may interpret situations as he would do in his own culture. In Russian the leave-taking До свидания can be pronounced both with low rising or low falling tone, which sounds neutral, while in English Good-bye! pronounced with a low falling tone sounds fairly rude, while rising tone makes it neutral.

There are some more extralinguistic factors like the speaker's individuality, temporal provenance, social provenance, range of intelligibility of the speaker. All of them are incidental, concomitant features. They are characteristic of a language user and can not vary.

One of the most important style-modifying factors is the degree of spontaneity. The types of speech situations which lead to spontaneous speech include classroom teaching, television and radio interviews, sporting commentaries on radio and television, conversations between experts in a particular field of knowledge. We should realize that between two poles of spontaneity there are a number of more delicate distinctions. The journalist, the politician, the teacher, the lawyer are used to producing spontaneous texts and speaking spontaneously about the same area of experience. Even if they have no texts in front of them there are elements of preparation and repetition.

There are situations where an utterance cannot be qualified as fully spontaneous from linguistic point of view even when its verbal realization is taking place at the moment of speaking. It can be explained a) by the length of the utterance (these are utterances produced in the form of lectures or reports), b) time-limits, so the message has to be siad without any hesitation; news over TV or radio, c) realization of somebody else's utterance, reading a piece of prose. In all these cases verbal realization is prepared in advance, it is written on a sheet of paper. This script version is read at the moment of production. The speaker uses it just to help himself remember the logic succession of the uttered contents. The primary distinction should be drawn (made) between two kinds of speech activity: speaking and reading, which are different in reference to the written text.

While spontaneous speech is taking place (when no notes are used) the process of psychic activity consists of two equally important items: a) the process of searching information and the ways of expressing it verbally and b) the process of giving information. The speaker has got an intention to express some ideas and he should choose an adequate linguistic form to express them.

Among the most important characteristics of a spoken spontaneous text there is a phenomenon called hesitation. A speaker hesitates to remember a further piece of information, to choose a correct word, a correct grammar structure and so on. The hesitation phenomenon breaks the regularity of phonetic form and there appear pauses of different length and quality which seldom occur at the syntactic juncture; lengthening of sounds within the words and in the word final position. In reading pauses occur at the syntactic junctures, so an intonation group coinsides with what is called a syntagm. In a spontaneous text hesitation often prevents the speaker from realising a full syntagm. There may appear a hesitation pause which breaks it, so an intonation group does not coincide with a syntagm. Thus we see that delimitation is realised differently in speaking and reading. We have tried to describe the main extralinguistic situational factors that make us choose the appropriate code of phonetic realisation of the spoken text. Still their role as style-modifying factors is different. Some of them like spontaniety play the decisive role, others as the number of listeners have less power. In everyday situations all of them are interconnected and interdependent and it is normally the combination of several of them that determines the style.

So there are certain non-linguistic features that correlate with variations of phonetic means. For example, the extralinguistic factors, mostly of psycholinguistic character, determine the laws and phonetic means of delimitation. Delimitation is commonly referred to as a style-differentiating feature on the perceptive level. There are different patterns of phonetic delimitation of an oral text. Fragments of speech continuum into which the whole text is naturally divided are as follows: a phonopassage (in monologues), a semantic block (in dialogues), a phrase, an intonation group. Accentuation of semantic centres is another style-differentiating feature. It is the intonation that marks the parts of the utterance expressing the main contents and opposes them to the rest of the text. The degree of contrast can vary, the variable being the marker of the style. For example, in spontaneous speech the contrast between accented and non-accented segments of an utterance is greater than in reading, due to the fact that in speech the unaccented elements are pronounced at a lower pitch. In general phonetic means of the language in interacting with lexics and grammar optimize the process of realization of ideas by verbal means.

Now we are approaching the problem of classification of phonetic styles. First of all, there is no classification that is admitted by most analysts. Still various speech realizations can be grouped on the basis of some most general common phonetic characteristics. We should have in mind that functional styles do not coincide with phonetic styles. First ones are differentiated on the basis of spheres of discourse and not on the basis of phonetic characteristics.

Dubovsky J.A. discriminates the following five phonetic styles: informal ordinary, formal neutral, formal official, informal familiar, declamatory. The division is based on different degrees of formality. According to another approach the criteria include the difference between segmental and suprasegmental levels of analysis. So there are five intonational styles singled out according to the purpose of communication: informational style, academic style (scientific), publicistic style (oratorial), declamatory style (artistic), conversational style (familiar). Still there are others factors that affect intonation in various extralinguistic situations. Any style with very little exception is seldom realized in its pure form. Every text is likely to include phonetic characteristics of different styles. In such cases we talk about overlapping of styles. The awareness of different phonetic styles of the language gives the opportunity to analyse and describe the speaking habits of English people and choose the style that fits the time, the place and the person.

An intonational style can be defined as a system of interrelated intonational means which is used in a social sphere and serves a definite aim of communication. Both the definition and classification of styles are not factitious ones but concrete examples taken from experimental data. The conception that the intonational style markers are restricted to certain kinds of situational contexts is extremely valuable. It is widely accepted that the purpose of communication determines the types of information conveyed in oral texts. They may be intellectual, attitudinal (emotional, modal) and volitional (desiderative). Each of these types is realised by means of specific prosodic parameters. These stylistically marked modifications of all the prosodic features represent the invariants of the style forming intonation patterns common to all the registers of the particular style. So intonation patterns vary in accordance with types of information present in communication. As any discourse carries intellectual information intellectual intonation patterns are present in every style. The distribution of attitudinal and volitional patterns shapes the particular intonational style and distinguishes one from another. The informational style seems to be the most neutral as its main purpose is to convey information without the speaker's concern or personal involvement. It may be considered as the opening variety for phonostylistic analysis.

The informational style is sometimes qualified as “formal”, “neutral”, since in an ideal setting it is least of all influenced or correlated by extralinguistic factors. It is manifested in the written variety of an informational narrative read aloud. The majority of these texts are of purely descriptive character and are simply called descriptive narratives. The written speech should not be subjected to the contextual variables and the commonest situation for this register is the reading of such texts in class. So they may be labelled as educational informational descriptive narratives. They may be presented in different forms: monologues, dialogues, polylogues. Especially reading of the news over the radio is very close in its manner to this style as the reader tends to sound impartial when reporting routine news or weather forecasts. The broadcast talk have both written and spoken existences which are of equal importance for the simple reason that they were written specially to be read aloud. The informational style includes other spheres of communication: business and legal intercourse, the reading of administrative documents. It may be wrong to identify this style as formal, because the degree of formality may vary. The style is usually limited to two common types: educational informationandpress reporting/broadcasting. The types of style or certain spheres of discourse would be called registers.

Any phonostylistic analysis falls into several steps. The first procedure will be the description of the speech situation which comprises the purpose, setting and participants. The next step is to define other extralinguistic factors, including the degree of preparedness. Still next step concerns the characteristics on the prosodic level. The text is split into phonopassages, then into phrases, then intonation groups.

Among the prosodic features of this style there are the following: loudness is relatively stable and normal, but within a phonopassage boundaries there is a gradual decrease of it. The rate of utterance is normal or rather slow. Together with the medium length of pauses and general tempo may be marked as moderate. One of the main style differentiating features on the prosodic level is the accentuation of the semantic centres. It is expressed commonly by terminal tones, pre-nuclear patterns, pitch range and pitch level degree of loudness on the accented syllables. So terminal tones are commonly expressed by a low falling tone, in pre-nuclear patterns falling and level types of heads prevail.

Press reporting and broadcasting is a strong ideological weapon and is socially and politically marked. The events of political importance can be presented to the public in different lights by using similar techniques, by changing the voice timber. It proves the statement that a journalist cannot be completely independent in his political views. The central function of a newspaper is to inform, to present a certain number of facts to a reader, listener with the effect of giving the impression of neutral, objective, factual reporting. Still the speech of radio and television announcers is different though they use similar techniques in the presentation. The ability to be seen on the screen makes a TV news reader use facial expressions and gestures. On the contrary the radio announcer, being isolated in a studio, tends to exaggerate certain prosodic features to be better understood by a listener. The description of phonostylistic characteristics reveals the following: timber may be unemotional, dispassionate, reserved, but very resolute and assured, a typical case of a newsreader's “neutral position”. Loudness ranges from normal to forte; it is especially varied at passage boundaries. Levels and ranges are usually normal, but contrasted when each news item is introduced and also at the semantic emphatic centres. Pauses tend to be rather long, especially when they occur between passages. The location of pauses is commonly predictable, syntactically or semantically determined. Rate is normally slow; deliberately slow on communicatively important centres. Types of heads vary, the most common being descending (falling or stepping), very often broken by accidental rise. Also the semantic centre of the preceding intonation group may be repeated at the beginning of the next utterance. Terminal tones are usually final and very categoric, falls prevail on communicative centres.

Academic styleis often described by specialists as both intellectual and volitional. It is frequently manifested in academic and educational lectures, scientific discussions, at the conferences, seminars and in classes. The above mentioned spheres of discourse have many features in common though they may have differences according to the speaker, the occupation of the language user, the exact nature of the occasion. The most pure manifestation of the academic intonational style is realized in a lecture. Lectures may sometimes sound as oratorical performances designed to entertain rather than inform, so there may be a great deal of overlap in these cases between different registers. The “ideal model” of the scientific style talk would be an academic informational lecture read aloud. It is almost certainly true that no public lecture is ever spontaneous. So it is very much in common with the reading of scientific prose. To guide understanding and control the audience the speaker outlines the points he is going to lecture about, uses all sorts of phrases to clarify his position and underline each new item in the text. The text is delimited in the way specific for any monological presentation.

The relationship between the lecturer and the public is on the whole rather formal. To obtain the balance between formality and informality the speaker uses:

1. the alternation of pauses, types of heads, pitch levels, terminal tones.

2. the ample use of variations and contrasts of the tempo to help the listener to differentiate between the more and less important parts of the flow of speech. The speaker normally slows down when he introduces rules, terms, scientific laws.

3. the rhythmical organization of a scientific text is properly balanced by the alternation of all prosodic features which gives the acoustic impression of “rhythmicality”.

4. high falling and falling-rising terminal tones are widely used as means of both logical and contrastive emphasis.

As the lecture duration is limited we do not touch all the styles but you can understand the principles of phonostylistic analysis.

LECTURE XII