7.3. Formal and informal talk
For the English language it has been established that RP as the national standard of pronunciation is most appropriate for public speaking, formal occasions, it is symbolic of higher social status and a high degree of communicative competence. The standard is stylistically differentiated, as there are situations when a more informal way of talking is quite appropriate.
What we will now be concerned with is pronunciation features which the speaker consciously or unconsciously selects according to his/her perception of the situation, especially depending on how formal or informal the situation is. The speaker's judgment of formality will depend on a number of factors, such as the relative status of the person he/she is talking to, which results in their different social roles, how well they know each other, the theme (topic) they are discussing, to what purpose (aim of the talk) and in what setting. Some idea of the range of formality can be given by listing just a few of the occasions: public meeting, lecture, consultation, conversation, chat.
In what the speaker sees as a very formal situation he will tend to articulate more slowly and carefully. Individual sounds will be given their full values, none will be omitted. In a very informal situation, on the other hand, he will be more likely to speak quickly, less carefully, and some sounds will either have their value changed or be omitted entirely.
Thus the word are maybe pronounced [a:] in deliberate, careful speech, but when unstressed will become [э] in more casual speech (this process being known as vowel reduction): that plate will become ['daep'pleit] (assimilation), expect so will become [iks'peksao] (elision).
Variation conditioned in this way by a person's perception of the situation in which he is speaking we refer to as stylistic.
It should not be thought that a more casual style of pronunciation is in any sense incorrect. It is really not a matter of correctness, but of appropriateness, of what is appropriate for the situation.
It is not only situational factors which determine the style of pronunciation, but also the speaker's personality. Some people are very sensitive to what they regard as the demands of a situation on their speech style, while others appear indifferent, speaking with little change of pronunciation in the widest range of situations. Some of those who always speak carefully and with great deliberation maintain that to do anything else is slovenly, sloppy, and leads to loss of clarity and to possible misunderstanding. In this claim they forget how much of language is redundant. There is usually far more information in an utterance than we need in order to understand it. The loss in information resulting from modifications in pronunciation of the kind exemplified above rarely causes confusion: [iks'pek 'seu] can only be expect so. Even where linguistically there is ambiguity, the situation will normally disambiguate (Wells 1990, Roach 2001).
Social psychologists define the speaker's strategy in varying social situations as "politeness-solidarity" choice. When talking formally to seniors one is expected to be very polite, as a sign of deference; the same tone of voice in the company of peers could be understood as either a joke or an attempt to demonstrate social distance, or even hostility.
A colleague of mine told me a funny episode in her interpreter-guide career. She met two English girls and talked to them freely on one day but on the other day she greeted them in the manner of the lady from the " London linguaphone course" recorded in the 1930s: "НеПо 'dears/I'm ^soglad you were able to 'come!" That voice shooed them off for ever.
A foreigner may be insensitive to a situation in another culture. Another educational problem is that when we listen to foreign speech we think that English speakers run their words together or talk too fast. And we don't realize that we do the same in our mother tongue.
When I spoke to the audience of undergraduates about elision I gave the Russian expression as an example: [Хоит и хоит] pronounced instead of Ходит и ходит. A girl in the front seat protested. She said: [at'kaspe'jij] meaning Это когда спешишь. I was grateful to her for the illustration of elision in Russian.
People often comment on the fact that when a foreign learner of English first comes to the British Isles, he/she is usually surprised (and dismayed) to discover how little he/she understands of the English around. For one thing, people seem to speak faster than expected. For another, the English that most of them speak seems to be different in many ways from the English of education. The reaction to this experience will vary. If he/ she is confident in his/her own and the teachers' ability, he/she may conclude that most of the English (and Welsh, Scottish, and Irish) people that he/she hears cannot, or at least do not, speak English correctly. Another reaction on the part of the learner to this failure to understand what is said maybe to think that perhaps what he/she learned back home was not "real" English. Happily, nowadays this is unlikely to be the case. But, although the English of education is real enough, it will tend to be limited to a single variety of the language, one chosen to serve as a model. It will usually be the speech of a particular group of native speakers as it is spoken, slowly and carefully, in rather formal situations (Hughes and Trudgill 1980; Roach 1983).
Although the opinion was expressed by a number of English phoneticians and educationalists more than twenty years ago, it is still valid today. Except that today the host of other varieties of English available for listening to has increased immensely, and the learner may get lost when faced with the necessity to choose one which he/she can emulate successfully together with features of informality, which are not always safe to integrate into a foreigner's speech.
As it has already been demonstrated, a foreigner may not always be sensitive enough to cultural constraints of the situation, as well as to the stylistic power of certain word and sound connotations. But it is his/her task to understand what he/she hears, and as far as listening comprehension is concerned, the samples of English he/she is exposed to while learning must really be varied. Also, it is a point of great controversy whether we should teach learners of English the so-called "weak forms" and other cases of vowel reduction, assimilation and elision (Jenkins 2001). Fortunately for Russian students, vowel reduction in the Russian language is just as common and nearly as powerful as it is in English, but for people whose mother tongue is syllable-timed and for tone language speakers this accent-determined phenomenon creates a problem in speaking English.
It is our task now to understand to what extent we are justified in integrating features of informal English speech into our own production practice. We will first have a look at what has been found by American and British research workers in ordinary conversational English.
William Labov was the first to quantify and measure stylistic variation in four modes of speech which he called "styles": (1) reading a word list, (2) reading a text, (3) interview, (4) casual speech. As is well known, the "paradox of the observer" consists in the fact that his/her presence, especially with the tape-recorder in hand, is in the way of people producing natural unmonitored speech. Casual informal speech is most difficult to get. Formal speech is the style which an interviewer will normally elicit in a field interview. Reading a text aloud is still more formal. The most monitored, the most formal "style" is reading aloud a list of words, particularly if they are pairs of words, potential minimal pairs with socially marked pronunciation variables.
W. Labov found a few ways to record casual speech: in case it was addressed to a family member, or a friend on the phone, or by triggering an emotionally-involved response to a question "Haveyou been in a situation when you thought you were in serious danger of being killed?' (When emotionally disturbed by bad memories, the respondent loosened his/her speech control.)
The linguistic variables were: (a) -ing endings pronounced either as [g] or [n], (b) glottal stop replacing [t] - [?], (c) h-dvop: the sound [h] replaced by zero, i.e. omitted at the beginning of words, (d) dese — dose words where the interdental fricatives [3,9] were replaced by dental stops [d, t], (e) rhoticity: the presence of [r] after a vowel which was omitted in lower New York classes, New York being an Mess area of the U.S.A.
The basic findings were: there is a pattern of steady increase in the values of non-standard forms as the speaker moves from the most formal to the most casual style.
In Britain, in the town of Norwich, Peter Trudgill who adopted William Labov's methodology, found the following percentages for [n] as against [rj] in the -ing variable: Casual Style (CS) 70% of [n], Formal Style (FS) 56%, Reading Passage Style (RPS) 27%, Word List Style (WLS) 11 %. The results suggest that the [n] variant was nearly seven times more likely to occur in casual speech than in reading.
Another finding indicated that the direction of style shifting along the formality scale is the same in all social classes but the values are graded: the formal style in a relatively low class resembles that of the casual style of the speaker in a higher class.
It sometimes happens that the style shift of a lower middle class (LM) or the upper working class (UW) is so abrupt, especially with women, that it overtakes the style shift of a higher, middle middle (MM) class. This was found in the /•-variable by W Labov in New York. The phenomenon is called "hypercorrection"; it is caused by "linguistic insecurity" of marginal classes and the desire of women to move up the social ladder.
Peter Trudgill, the British sociolinguist, also found similar signs of social mobility aspirations in women of the lower middle class. Labov's findings were supported by the data in other parts of the world.
To sum it up, standard forms tend to be used in formal styles of speech, while non-standard forms are more likely to occur in the informal casual speech. The style shift is common for all classes, but the values of particular linguistic variables reveal that there is gradience in the values as you move from one class to the other. The society standards present a continuum of changing sound forms.