The Invariant of Phonostylistic Characteristics of the Declamatory Prose Reading
Date: 2015-10-07; view: 548.
A. J.Cronin. The Citadel) Table 11
| Timbre | concerned, personally involved, emotionally rich | |
| Delimitation | phonopassages — phrases — intonational groups | |
| Style-marking prosodic features | Loudness | varied according to the size of the audience and to the emotional setting |
| Levels and ranges | variable | |
| Rate | deliberately slow, necessitated by the purpose of the reading: the complete understanding of the author's message by the listener; changes in the speed of utterances are determined by the syntactic structures, importance of information and the degree of emphasis | |
| Pauses | long, especially between the passages. Disjunctive pauses tend to be longer than connecting ones. Internal boundary placement is always syntactically or semantically predictable. A declamatory reading is distinctly marked by a great number of prolonged emphatic pauses — the device used by the reader to underline the emphasis | |
| Rhythm | properly organized, the isochronic recurrence of stressed and unstressed syllables | |
| The accentuation of semantic centres | Terminal tones | common use of categoric low and high falls in final and even initial intonation groups and on semantic centres; occasional use of rising and level tones to break the monotony and in initial groups to connect segments of the phrase, to lead the listener on the later developments- |
| Pre-nuclear patterns | varied, contain patterns which have both common emphatic and non-emphatic usage; for the emphasis the following patterns are most frequently used: Low Head + High Fall High Head + Low Fall High Head + High Fall Stepping Head + High Fall | |
| The contrast between accented and unaccented segments | not great |
Our final procedure will be the phonological opposition of the informational and declamatory reading.
The opposition shows that both readings differ totally in any aspect, but primarily in the voice timbre — in the declamatory reading the emotional colouring of the voice is very rich, varied according to the degree of emphasis.
On the prosodic level the markers of the declamatory style reading are:
1. Slow tempo, caused by the lento rate of utterances and prolonged pauses, especially at the passage boundaries.
2. Stable rhythmicality.
3. The use of the falling terminal tones in initial intonation groups, the increase of their range with the emphasis.
Now by way of conclusion we would like to say that we have made an attempt here to describe one type of the declamatory style reading, which we claim to be valuable for teachers of English.
Of course, there are as many specifications in the reading as there are authors, script-writers, actors, verse-reciters, fable readers and so on, but the lack of space in this book does not allow us to go into more detailed analysis. Language teachers should pay a great deal of attention to the expressive declamatory reading as it enables written literature to be accessible, to broaden the pupils' and students' horizons, to show them the subtleties of the author's intentions, to unlock his secrets and pave the way to something new, something different.
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