Module 10 Publicistic Style

Theoretical Material

The term "publicistic style" serves to label a broad variety of types, which can be distinguished on the basis of the speaker's occupation, situation and purpose. One of the uses which might be subsumed under this heading is the type of public speaking dealing with political and social problems (e.g. parliamentary debates, speeches at rallies, congresses, meeting and election campaigns).

Any kind of public oration imposes some very important constraints on the speaker. Normally, it is the written variety of English that is being used (a speech may be written out in full and rehearsed). The success of a political speech-maker is largely dependent on his ability to manipulate intonation and voice quality. As far as his primary desire is to convince the listeners of the merits of his case he has to ensure a well-defined progression of ideas combined with persuasive and emotional appeal.

The intonation adequate for political speeches is characterized by the following features. In the pre-nuclear part the main patterns are:

(Low Pre-Head +) Stepping Head;

(Low Pre-Head +) Falling Head.

The heads are often broken due to extensive use of accidental rises to make an utterance more emphatic. The High Level Head is less frequent and the Low-Level Head here is indicative of tonal subordination. (Tonal subordination may be regarded as a case when the pitch level of an intonation group is dependent on its neighbours; semantically and communicatively more important intonation groups being pronounced on a higher pitch-level).

The nuclear tone of final intonation groups is generally the Low-Fall; the High-Fall is much less common. Both simple and compound tunes are found within non-final intonation groups. (Such tunes are, namely, the Low-Fall, the Low-Rise, the Mid-Level and the Fall-Rise).

It is interesting to note that the Low-Rise and the Mid-Level are typical of less formal and more fluent discourse, especially if the falling and the rising parts of the tune are separated by some stressed or unstressed syllables.

Here is a list of basic intonation patterns which may be found in publicistic style:

(Low Pre-Head +) (Falling Head +) High Fall (+ Tail)

Low Rise

Fall-Rise

(Stepping-Head+) Low Fall

Low Rise

High Fall

(High or Medium Level Head +) Low Rise

High Fall

High Fall + Rise

Mid Level

The speed of utterance is related to the degree of formality, the convention being that formal speech is usually slow, less formal situations entail acceleration of speed.

Variations in rhythm are few. Pausation and the ensuing internal boundaries are explicable in semantic and syntactic terms. Intonation groups tend to be short and as a result pauses are numerous, ranging from brief to very long. Hesitation pauses are to be avoided, still silent hesitation pauses occasionally do occur. It is interesting to note that some speakers make use of rhetorical silence to gain maximum effect. Moreover, an utterance is often emphasized by means of increased sentence-stress and the glottal stop.