The Invariant of Phonostylistic Characteristics of Publicistic Oratorial Speeches
Date: 2015-10-07; view: 458.
| Timbre | dignified, self-assured, concerned and personally involved; a variety of attitudinal and modal expressions in the voice | |
| Delimitation | phonopassages — phrases — intonation groups | |
| Style-marking prosodic features | Loudness | enormously increased, ranging from forte to fortissimo; sometimes instances of diminished loudness are observed to bring out words and phrases of paramount importance and produce certain psychological effect |
| Ranges and levels | greatly varied; the predominant use of wide ranges within the phonopassage; a very high level of the start of the initial intonation groups | |
| Rate | moderately slow; the public speaker slows down to bring out communicatively important centres; less important information entails acceleration of speed | |
| Pauses | definitely long between the passages; a great number of breath-taking pauses; pausation is commonly explicable in semantic and syntactic terms; interpausal segments are rather short, thus phrases may be overloaded by pauses of different length; another characteristic feature of this register is a rather frequent stop of phonation before the emphatic semantic centre; it serves as a means of bringing out words and phrases; voiceless hesitation pauses occur to produce the effect of apparent spontaneity, "rhetorical silence" is often used to exert influence on the public | |
| Rhythm | properly organized; within the speech segments rhythmic groups have recurrent alternation, which produces the acoustic effect of strict rhythmicality | |
| The accentuation of semantic centres | Terminal tones | mostly emphatic, especially on emotionally underlined semantic centres; in non-final intonational groups falling-rising tones are frequent; terminal tones are contrasted to distinguish between the formal segments of speech and less formal ones (illustrations, examples, jokes, and so on) |
| Pre-nuclear patterns | common use of the descending sequence of stressed syllables; a large proportion of falling and stepping heads, frequently broken by accidental rises to increase the emphasis; another common "rhetorical trick" is the tonal subordination when semantically and communicatively important intonation groups contrast with their neighbours by all prosodic features; so the high level head may be alternated with the low level head, especially in enumerations | |
| The contrast between accented and unaccented segments | not great | |
| Paralinguistic features | a great number of paralinguistic effects, kinesic components — facial expressions, bodily movements, gestures — subjected to the main purpose of the publicistic discourse: to influence the audience, involve it. into the talk and to exert the expected response from it |
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Publicistic speakers are usually very enthusiastic about what they say and how they say, so they may go to extremes by enormously increasing the loudness and alternate it with whisper or by pronouncing very long breath groups and suddenly interrupt the phonation by using the rhetorical silence. These and other prosodic contrasts produce great effects and captivate the attention and interest of the listener.
The greatest single stylistic characteristic of publicistic speeches is the large amount of parallelisms on any level, prosodic features including.
All the above-mentioned general characteristics serve to produce a complex vocal effect called "oration", designed to make the listeners respond to the publicistic speech-maker. So a clear phonological distinction can be drawn between this intonational style and others in terms of markedly different prosodic structures but there is no clear boundary between certain types of lectures, publicistic speeches and declamatory performances.
We have tried to describe here only one register of the style. There are certainly other spheres of discourse — spontaneous speeches at the meetings, debates, theatrical oratorial procedures at parties, anniversaries and so on. They will certainly differ greatly on the prosodic level, but the volitional function of intonation, expressed by the contrast of all prosodic parameters, will always be in the foreground and mark the publicistic style.
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