Situational variation

Linguistics emphasizes the need to study language in its social context, or, to be more precise, the context of situation. The term situation is "generally used to refer to the extralinguistic setting in which an utterance takes place — referring to such notions as number of participants, level of formality, nature of the ongoing activities, and so on. In a more restricted sense the term situation may be used to refer to the socially distinctive characteristics of the setting in which language is used" {Crystal, 1983:323).

The aim of sociophonetics is to correlate phonetic variations with variations in social situations. The relevant situational factors are: sphere of communication (academic, business, home, transport, service, entertainment), setting (locality and the size of the audience), media (face-to-face interaction, telephone, TV or radio interview), social role (doctor or patient, parent or child, boss or secretary, customer or seller), topic (cultural or political news, academic, sports, gossip), aim of the speaker (to inform, to impress, to stimulate, to entertain, or just to engage someone in a chat).

How important are the above-mentioned situational factors for the pho­netic variables? How often does one change one's accent to accommodate to the situation? People who volunteered to taperecord their speech in the formal situation of the office have demonstrated an ability to vary their speaking styles at least four times a day when speaking: a) to their seniors, b) to their colleagues, c) to customers and d) to members of the family or friends over the phone. To these we could add conversations that take place at home (some of them are very intimate and special, like talking to pets and babies), in the transport, in the shops and at social gatherings, like parties and meetings. There are certain conventions, i.e. social norms for certain situations, and the most powerful factor here will be our social role, which depends on who we are talking to: authority, non-authority or someone of equal status. The basic types of speech will be formal or informal, and the two strategies people employ in demonstrating their relations with someone they talk to are politeness or solidarity, which means either using more prestige forms or more advanced, sometime stigmatised forms.

Well-established, conservative forms tend to be regarded as "correct" whilst innovations tend to be stigmatized. This attitude may result in a speaker's use of'verifiable, with the stress on the initial syllable, in a formal situation and the use of verifiable, with the stress on the third syllable, in a more casual situation. Another example of pronunciation shift: during ['dju:nrj] in a formal situation and ['ёзипп] in a less formal one.

Most of the people are unaware of their own chameleon pronunciation shifts. The use of the standard forms or less standard forms may very well depend on the situation to which some individuals find it easier to accommodate, while others retain their individuality more rigidly, whichever the setting.

What are the phonetic features of informal talks? Sociolinguistic research has given evidence to the fact that in informal talk speakers use three times as many /«g-forms pronounced as [m] as in the words lookin', walkin' compared with the more formal situations. Similarly, the use of glottal stops and /z-drops in pronouns are reported to increase as the formality of the situation decreases. A MM-speaker (middle middle class) in an informal situation scores as an UW-speaker (upper working class) in a formal situ­ation, at least as far as the ing-forms are concerned.

Apart from the competing variants of pronunciation one of which is old, while the other is new, there are features which are caused by differences between reading from a prepared script and a spontaneous talk. Ac­cording to the Russian tradition, the stylistic classification of pronuncia­tion styles involved only two categories: "full" style (полный) and "non-full" (неполный). Classifying speaking styles into careful and casual is based on the degree of preparedness/spontaneity, which affects precision of articulation, tempo and the amount of hesitation phenomena in speech. Obviously, conversation which is the most common type of human speech activities belongs to the latter, a more casual, "non-full" style.

There are specific features of informal talk in RP which are so well established that if you ignore them, your speech will sound unnaturally careful, an accent of a foreign learner of English. They were described in J.С Wells' book on English accents in 1982, and maybe listed here:

Assimilation which is the result of coarticulation processes, e.g. good girl is pronounced actually like [gug дз;1], ten minutes as [tem mimts].

Elision is observed in final consonant clusters mainly, e.g. I expect so is pronounced as [ai iks'pek 'sau].

Vowel reduction, or weakening, is a well-attested fact, especially in form words, e.g. We are here will be realized as [wi э hia], as against the strong form of are [a:] in a stressed position, such as Oh you ~~are, ^aren't you.

Contraction is another form of weakening, e.g. literary [htn].

Intrusive r is the only case where we observe adding a sound which does not show up in spelling: Asia(r) and Africa, law(r) and order.

There are also prosodic signals of social relations of people: depending on whether we talk to strangers or good friends, seniors or juniors. Experimental data suggest that speaking in a wide pitch range, with higher and deeper falling tones, as well as with longer pauses and slower tempo, is more suitable for the voice of authority and is associated with dominance. A narrow pitch range coupled with rising tones plus a certain timing pattern (either too slow, with hesitation pauses, or too fast) is a sign of lower status and submissiveness. Voice quality features are very important for rec­ognizing some typical voices, e.g. resonance in a preacher's voice, creaky voice in RP men's low tones, whisper in intimate or secretive talk, falsetto voice in mimicking someone funny, etc.

Summing up the above-adduced phonetic facts we can state that a number of phonetic features which are treated as signs of language development by linguists are considered non-standard and inappropriate for formal speech. However, they pass unnoticed in informal situations and may be used by those people who do not approve of them. Most speakers are unaware of their own changing speech patterns which are provoked, in the first place, by the informality of the situations in which speech control is minimal, and, in the second, by the spontaneous character of running speech. It results in people shifting their pronunciation to a less established, stigmatized form and also performing the absolutely appropriate operations of reduction, elision and assimilation. In some of the informal situations RP can be a handicap if used inappropriately, since it may be taken as a mark of affectation or a desire to emphasize social superiority. Both segmental features (vowels and consonants) and suprasegmental ones (pitch range, tempo, pauses, voice quality) are relevant for indicating formal/informal style switch appropriate for the occasion.

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