ГОС_1 / Теор. фонетика

7. Divide the sentences into rhythmic groups attaching the unstressed syllable to the preceding stressed syllable rather than the following one.

Thank you for the present.

Somebody called you when you were out.

I would have tried to see his point of view.

Perhaps we might go to the movie together for once.

I should think it would be better to wait till tomorrow.

Test

111

Lecture 7

STYLE CHARACTERISTICS OF INTONATION

Plan

1.Informational style.

2.Informational dialogues.

3.Press reporting and broadcasting.

4.Academic style.

5.Publicistic style.

6.Declamatory style.

7.Conversational style.

8.Intonation and language teaching.

1. Informational Style

“An intonational style can be defined as a system of interrelated intonational means which is used in a social sphere and serves a definite aim of communication"­ [Соколова и др.: 216].

The choice of an intonational style is determined primarily by the purpose of communication and then by a number of other extralinguistic and social factors. The following intonational­ styles are singled out:

1.Informational.

2.Academic (Scientific).

3.Publicistic (Oratorial).

4.Declamatory (Artistic).

5.Conversational (Familiar).

Intonational style mark­ers are restricted to .certain kinds of situational contexts and above all to the speakers' aim in communication. Thus an intonational style is seen as some kind of additive­ by which a basic content of thought may be modified.

The purpose of communication­ determines the types of information conveyed in oral texts. They may be intellectual, attitudinal (emotional, modal) and vo­litional (desider- ative). Each of these types is realised by means of specific prosodic parameters.

These stylistically marked modifications of all the prosodic features represent the invariants of the style forming intonation patterns common to all the registers of the

particular style.

The invariant of the intonation patterns circulating in certain fields of communica- tion at a given period of time may be treated as the norm or the ideal of speech behaviour for these particular spheres of communication.

Informational style is sometimes qualified as "formal", "neutral", since in an ideal setting, in its pure manifestation it is least of all influenced or correlated by extralinguistic factors. It is manifested in the written variety of an informational narrative read aloud. The majority of these texts are of a purely descriptive character and are simply called descriptive narratives. The written speech, the reading, should not be subjected to the con-

textual variables and the commonest­ and "ideal" situation for this register is the reading of such texts in class. They may be labelled as educational informational­ descriptive narratives.

As is widely known, spoken speech is less imperial, the spo­ken variety of such texts expresses more personal concern and involvement. They may be presented in different

forms: monologues,­ dialogues, polylogues.

Press reporting and broadcasting, especially the reading of the news coverage over the radio is very close in its manner to this type of the style as the reader tends to

112

sound impartial when reporting routine news or weather forecasts, for example. Informational style includes other spheres of communication: business­ and legal

intercourse, the reading of administrative documents­ and so on.

Types of style, i.e. certain spheres of discourse are called registers, the term being widely used abroad in a broader sense, often meant as style in general (see table 22).

Table 22

The Correlation Between the Informational Intonational Style Registers and

Speech Typology

Table 23

Spheres of Discourse in which the Informational Intonational Style Can Be Heard in Relation to Forms of Communication and the

Number of Participants Involved

The invariants of phonostylistic characteristics of informational educational descriptive texts reading and descriptive spontaneous monologue are presented in tables 24, 25.

113

Table 24

The Invariant of Phonostylistic Characteristics of Informational Educational

Descriptive Texts Reading

114

Table 26

The Opposition of Phonostylistic Invariant Characteristics of

Informational Descriptive Monologue

115

By comparing the invariant characteristics of the two varieties of the language (written and spoken) in this register by the systematic­ phonological opposition we can make the following­ conclusion:

1.Written (read aloud) and spoken texts belonging to the same intonational style have different prosodic realization.

2.In oral speech the means of the prosodic realization are more vivid, expressive and’ varied, especially in voice timbre, loudness, tempo, length of pauses and rhythm.

3.The speaker often uses some hesitation phenomena (hesi­tation pauses and temporizers) intentionally, which enables him to obtain the balance between formality and informality and establish­ contacts with the public.

4.The speaker uses various hesitation phenomena uninten­tionally which enables him to gain the time in search for suitable expression or idea and thus not interrupt the flow of speech.

5.The speech is characterized by a greater number of intona­tion groups, supraphrasal units and phonopassages. In spontane­ous speech an intonation group doesn’t always coincide with a syntagm. Pauses at the end of the phrase are optional.

6.The reading is characterized by a decentralized stress dis­tribution whereas speaking

– by a centralized one.

7.Spontaneous speech is more contrastive, communicative centers are more vividly underlined; the emphasis is achieved by a wider range of terminal tones, greater degree of loudness and prominence of accented segments.

8.The reading is rhythmical, oral speech rhythm is non-sys­tematic, unpredictable, variable (see table 26).

2. Informational Dialogues

Our next step in the analytic style description will be a dialogue.

The following factors seem to be basical for the description in the dialogue – monologue dichotomy:

1.the subject matter of a talk, its randomness,

2.the inexplicitness of the speech,

3.the incompleteness of utterances,

116

4.the redundance of vocal expression.

This gives us the reason to distinguish several types of dialogues:

5.specialized informative talks on serious and intellectual subject­ matters (such as educational, psychological, political, etc.).

6.discussions on serious and weighty problems,

7.debates,

8.everyday conversations, telephone talks among them.

There are certain things common to all dialogue talks as opposed to monologues. A

dialogue is a coordinated simultaneous speech act of two participants or rather a speaker and a listener. Thus the factuous contact is conveyed. It is essential that in any success­ful conversation "give-and-take" between the sender and receiver­ should be maintained.

The attention-getting function is established by putting all sorts of questions, agreement, question tags to show the interest and guide the course of the talk towards a given theme and also by using all sorts of response and non-response words and utter­ ances both of verbal and non-verbal character. This communion may be so close that the speakers often talk simultaneously­. There might be also permanent recapitulations upon the request of the listener. The utterances on the part of both participants tend to be incomplete since the context makes per­fectly plain to them what was being intended thus making redundant­ its vocal expression.

Hesitation phenomena are of primary significance in deter­mining acceptability or otherwise of conveyers. Hesitancy is strongly influenced by periods of creative thinking and word searching. Voiceless hesitation is also very frequent, it tends to occur relatively randomly, not just at places of major grammatical­ junctions, which is more the pattern of written English read aloud. Voiced hesitation' consists of hesitant drawls, verbal and non-verbal fillers such as er, ehm, mm.

Any kind of dialogue is also joined up by means of non-verbal communication — facial expressions (a raised eyebrow, a glance towards the partner, etc.), gestures, body movements and noises such as whistles, artificial clearing of the throat, snorts, sniffs, laughs and other paralinguistic features of significance.

On the lexical and grammatical level there is a highproportion­ of errors which seem not to bother the speakers.

Interpolations are commonly interjectional in character, their function is primarily to indicate that attention is being maintained­.

We should also mention here all sorts of introductions, afterthoughts,­ high proportion of parenthetical words which even increases­ in a more serious type of conversation.

Dialogues are commonly characterized by a large number of loosely coordinated clauses, the coordination being structurally ambiguous, a series of loosely coordinated sentence-like structures­.

The invariant of phonostylistic characteristics of informational spontaneous dialogues is given in table 27.

117

Table 27

The Invariant of Pbonostylistic Characteristics of Informational

Spontaneous Dialogues

By opposing informational monologue – dialogue­ phonostylistic characteristics we will draw the following conclusions:

1.The structural hierarchy of a monologue is: phonopassages – phrases – intonation groups; whereas the one of a dialogue is: blocks – dialogical units – phrases – intonation groups.

118

2.There is some distinction between the opposed varieties on the part of segmental features notably in vowel length, voicing and devoicing of consonants, assimilations and elisions, but the phonological differences lie mainly in the use of non-segmental features of basic prosodic configurations.

3.In a dialogue there is a wider range of contrasts in prosodic and paralinguistic effects, thus the danger of misunderstanding is avoided through the introduction of a large number of prosodic contrasts.

4.The attitudes of the talkers are more variable in a dialogue, but, since both analysed forms belong to the informational style, impartiality prevails. Changes in the attitude condition changes in prosodic features. They also condition variations in utterance length. In a dialogue there is a strong tendency to keep them short, to break up potentially lengthy intonation groups wherever possible. The average length of units in the majority of cases falls within the range of 1—5 words. Relatively high proportion of incomplete­ phrasal segments is noticeable. Phrases are commonly short at the beginning, longer as topics are introduced, longer still as argument develops and short again as the end approaches.

5.In a dialogue the rhythmicality is even more non-systematic,­ there is no stable pattern of rhythm.

6.The tempo (rate + pauses) in a monologue is normally less varied but in both cases it is conditioned by the importance of information, the fluency of speakers, their familiarity with the topic (theme) and experience in speaking. In general in a mono­ logue less fluent speech is being the expected kind.

3. Press Reporting and Broadcasting

It is common knowledge that press reporting and broadcasting is a strong ideological weapon and is surely socially and politically marked. The same text addressed to a foreign listener sounds more imposing and edifying.

The events of political importance can be presented to the public in different lights by using similar techniques, by changing­ the voice timbre. This only proves the statement that a journalist,­ a reporter cannot be completely independent in his political­ views of his class, party, country and so on.

The central function of a newspaper and news bulletin is to inform, to present a certain number of facts to a reader, listener, or a viewer with the effect of giving the impression of neutral, objective, factual reporting. So all types of discourse in that style share some important prosodical features.

It should be noted, however, that the speech of radio and tel­evision announcers is somewhat different though they use similar­ techniques in the presentation, the ability to be seen on the screen helps a TV news reader to guide the understanding to the viewer by means of facial expressions and gestures. On the con­trary the radio announcer, being isolated in a studio, tends to exaggerate certain prosodic features to be better understood by a listener.

The speech of a radio announcer is very close to the "ideal model" and especially during news coverage when he elegantly enunciates the news in rather chilly distant tones adopted specially­ for this occasion.

The invariant of phonostylistic characteristics of the reading of a news bulletin (press reporting and broadcasting) is in table 28.

By the phonological opposition of phonostylistic characteristics of the reading of an informational descriptive text and a news bulletin we come to the following conclusions:

1.Broadcast texts and newspaper articles read aloud convey mainly the intellectual information as it is the language of factual statements; thus attitudinal and emphatic funciton of intonation is of secondary importance here.

2.The prosodic parameters are not greatly varied in both registers of the style but for several occasions in news bulletins when pitch levels, types of heads and pauses

119

are alternated to break the monotony of speech and draw the listeners’ or view­ ers’ attention to something very important in a message. This often­ happens when events are enumerated. It is a very notable feature here – the ability of good newsreaders to mark the beginning­ and the end of each new paragraph or topic.

3.The voice timbre is a very important marker of a news coverage reading. It is some- thing peculiar, very easily identified, often labelled as “distant”, “indifferent”, “im- partial”, “neutral”. It is true, of course, for events of a routine character. When tragic events are broadcast, for instance, all the prosodic features are switched to convey the meaning.

Table 28

The Invariant of Phonostylistic Characteristics of the Reading of a News Bulletin

4.In the “news bulletin reading” type of the informational style the use of broken descending heads and fall-rises on initial intonation groups is more common.

5.Pauses tend to be longer, the general tempo is faster than that in the descriptive reading.

6.The “broadcast” reading is more properly rhythmically organized­. Highly skilled newsreaders are capable of making the sense clear by the careful control of rhythm.

4. Academic Style

Academic style is often described by phonostylists as both intellectual and volitional. It is determined by the purpose of the communication as the speaker's aim is to attract the listener's­ attention, to establish close contacts with the audience and

120