Informational Dialogues

Our next step in the analytic procedural style description will be the text handled by two speakers in a rather formal manner.

But, before doing this, we would like to describe here different types of dialogues. Firstly we must mention that dialogues of all types are very widely used forms of speech and because of the great flexibility of their usage there is a wide range of contrasts. Consequently there exists no general agreement among phoneticians on what is meant by this or that type of a dialogue and the results of the research carried out into this form of speech have been yet rather sporadic in their comments. They provide us with a great deal to discuss at all levels of analysis (13, 30, 53).

Evidently the type of a dialogue may be primarily distinguished through its phonology. Very close examination of experimental data of many researchers shows that certain prosodic characteristics of considerable importance diagnose different types of dialogues. "A clear central area of distinctiveness can be defined, but there are a number of very uncertain marginal issues which reflect the way in which conversation blends imperceptibly into discussion and talking shop" (54, p. 116).

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

a) the subject matter of a talk, its randomness,

b) the inexplicitness of the speech,

c) the incompleteness of utterances,

d) the redundance of vocal expression.

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

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

3. discussions on serious and weighty problems,

4. debates,

5. everyday conversations, telephone talks among them.

Evidently, the major markers of these types will be on the prosodic level.

We do not wish to suggest that any clear lines of stylistic demarcation have been drawn in this classification, it is unlikely that there is a distinct boundary between the varieties.

Now we shall focus our attention on the first type as these dialogues are within the sphere of the informational style discourse and other types can wait until later description.

We would like to mention here that conversation will be opposed to the informational talks later in the course as there is a great departure between them on all the levels of linguistic analysis.

Also these talks should be distinguished from discussions in terms of the degree of seriousness of the subject matter and the formality of the occasion and probably non-segmental prosodic correlations should be taken into account. It is quite obvious, however, that there are certain things common to all dialogue talks as opposed to monologues and we would like to describe them here.

Firstly, 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 utterances both of verbal and non-verbal character. This factuous 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 high- proportion 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 phonostylistic analysis of the helpful sample of the dialogue-talk of the informational character will allow us to draw the conclusions of the prosodic distinctive features, marking this variety of dialogues.

The talk is about two oldest universities of Britain — Oxford and Cambridge. This is a mono-thematic talk, though the speakers display some obvious differences of opinion on the subject matter.

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