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.

7.4. The art of speech: phonetic aspects

This book is laid out so as to unfold, little by little, the mysteries of our everyday experience in speaking and listening to people, from the scientific point of view. It is also designed to be helpful in instructing students how to acquire methods of self-improvement in phonetics.

As this is not a manual designed for a practical course in phonetics we can only outline the general principles and give a few tips about how to speak most effectively in a number of situations, from the phonetic point of view. We mean, first of all, voice control, or voice monitoring.

Today the most common situations are:

• face-to-face interaction,

• telephone conversation,

• interview,

• presentation (public speaking).

In face-to-face interaction, be it a friendly meeting or a party, one has to present oneself as a pleasant personality, reliable and trustworthy. (I am sure there are other personality traits we would like to project on our listeners but these are the first ones necessary to establish contact.)

Apart from the body language (a friendly smile, a firm handshake, a nod, a turn of the head, eye contact, personal space proxemics) there is very little you can do until you are spoken to (but that visual indexical information already takes care of more than 50 per cent of the impression you make). But you cannot escape greetings and other conversational formulas. It is amazing how cliched (intonationally) opening gambits and other social formulas are, and how reluctant our students are to practise them because they think they know what to say. I have witnessed that Russian girls fail to use them because they can't respond to the cultural code automatically. They just smile, which is good. They look friendly but dumb. Check yourself for the quick response to: (a) Hi there! (b) How are you? (c) / like your hat. (d) Pleased to meet you. (e) Thank you very much.

Paradoxically, the word which is mispronounced most of the time is thank in " Thank you" because it was first learned at school or somewhere else and has not been corrected since. Intonationally, the low-falling pat­tern of "Hello" was just as persistent and rude.

When you are engaged in a conversation, speech etiquette prompts you turn-taking techniques and the level of loudness acceptable for the company you are in. Speaking loudly is away of attracting attention, keeping the floor, interrupting others. This can lead to serious misunderstanding: people accustomed to soft voices may misinterpret louder voices as being overbearing or vulgar; however, people accustomed to louder voices often judge softer-voiced speakers as cold, distant, unfriendly or mousy (Chaika 1994:96).

Telephone talks and interviews also have their own constraints on the level of loudness, tempo and patterns of intonation. The less familiar you are with the other party, the more formal, polite and clear-spoken you are supposed to be. Choose the standard pronunciation forms to be on the safe side and keep the back channel working, especially on the phone. Your self-presentation starts from your first "hello" on the phone and the job interview may never be reached if you fail in that.

In contrast to interpersonal communication, public speaking calls for the maximum of your volume which couldn't be dropped throughout the talk in a way Russian voices tend to go (the so-called "trailing" or "fading" effect which would be a sign of fatigue or boredom in English). The most common error of young people learning to speak in public is reading a prepared text with accelerating tempo. Timing is a great art: keeping pho-nation/pausation balance, slowing down before a new word or just the key words, after a rhetorical question, contrasting more relevant and less relevant information by switching the rate of delivery. And the total time given must be carefully and sparingly distributed between the talk proper and the question period.

The most important rule written in all the books on rhetoric says: vary your voice. And by voice they mean pitch, to begin with. Pitch and tempo variation are the key clues to making one's speech lively, expressive and interesting to the listeners. How does one do it? How can we avoid monotony by keeping the loudness level rather high?

Actors, especially singers, know the effect of occasional lowering the pitch without dropping the level of loudness. Because speech delivery is linear, the main principle is contrast to the previous element, like a thesis and an argument, a concept and its illustration. By contrasting them through the height of the voice the speaker avoids monotony.

Another classical principle of rhetoric is to structure the talk according to 'etos-logos-pathos' triad. The first part (Introduction) is used for estab­lishing contact with the audience and gaining their trust. This is called 'etos' and here the tone of voice is less formal than the rest of the talk. It is a very important moment (I saw volumes of opening gambits, sayings and jokes specially compiled for speakers). The main part of the talk is called 'logos', and here the target is to tell the audience what was meant to tell most convincingly. How does one manage to sound confident and competent? It is by employing a resonant voice quality, wide pitch range, and a fair amount of high falling tones applied to the key words that gives the impression of dominance (plus loudness and tempo, see above). The final part is where the speaker calls the audience for action, it is termed 'pa thos'. The emotional charge of the finale is the greatest. If the speaker shows personal interest and involvement, which is quite appropriate for moving the audience, this is the place for it. It is usually most carefully prepared, and must never be skipped; if time is short, the main part is the one to be abridged mercilessly.

To sum up: your voice carries much indexical information above the message you are trying to convey to your audience. This could be phonetically monitored through practice in reading with loudness, tempo, pitch and voice quality modulations and careful timing.

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