Intonational Peculiarities of Informational Texts

This intonational style is sometimes qualified as “formal”, “neutral”, since in an ideal setting, in its pure manifestation it is least of all influenced by extralinguistic factors.

First of all, it happens in the written variety of an informational narrative read aloud. As is widely known, spoken speech is less imperial, the spoken variety of such texts expresses more personal concern and involvement. Press reporting and broadcasting is very close in the manner to reading aloud informational narrative as the news reader tends to sound impartial when reporting routine news or weather forecasts, for example.

In this manual we’ll be dealing with an informational narrative read aloud and its spoken variety since they seem to be most applicable to teaching profession.

Study table 6.

Table 6

Phonostylistic	Varieties of the language
characteristics	Reading	Speaking
timbre	impartial, neutral, dispassionate	neutral, dispassionate, occasionally conveying a fair degree of personal involvement, interested
loudness	normal throughout the text, varied at the phonopassage boundaries	varied (varying from loud to low)
levels and ranges	medium levels; ranges are wide	mid; a bit narrower than in reading
tempo	normal; even or slow	varied; faster than in reading; slower on emphatic centres
pauses	not greatly varied, longer at the phonopassage boundaries, syntactically and semantically predictable	varied from long to short; hesitation pauses non-predictable
rhythm	even	varied
terminal tones	falls Fall-Rise or Low Rise may be in non-final tone group	falls on semantic centres; Low Rises, Mid Levels and Fall-Rises in non-final groups
pre-nuclear patterns	descending and level heads	varied; common use of level heads and broken scales

Scientific Style Lectures and Speeches

Classroom lectures are generally formal in style, but the manner of delivery may differ (markedly) from one lecture to another. In a university class the size of the audience has a great deal of influence on the style of the lecture. If the audience of a small group — up to about 10, for example — the speaker is likely to become rather informal; in large lecture halls with a hundred or more students present, he will speak quite differently. If the professor expects the students to make notes, he will speak more slowly and leave more pauses.

Speeches (orations, public addresses) are quite formal in style even though here and there they may use slang or other informal speech patterns for special effect. The delivery of speeches is quite distinctive. The pitch of the speaker’s voice tends to be higher than his normal speaking range, and the regular intonation patterns of the language are sometimes exaggerated and even distorted.

These devices were developed originally, of course, so that the speaker could be understood by large numbers of people who might be some distance away from him. With modern amplification devices, these speech patterns are no longer as necessary as they used to be, but public speakers still use them, probably because they feel that the audience expects them to. The speech would not seem very important if it was read without extra emphasis, without unusual pitches and intonation patterns, without the pauses and other devices that are characteristic of the oratorial style.