Styles and style-forming means

Formal and informal talk

Stress-timed and syllable-timed rhythms

Spontaneous talk

Prose

Verse

Rhythm of verse and prose

Styles and style-forming means

PHONOSTYLISTICS

LECTURE 7

7.4.The art of speech: phonetic aspects

There are a number of methods linguists can use to elicit knowledge about language in general and the way people treat sounds in particular. We have already found that people need sounds to distinguish words which have different meanings and forms (Part II), to signal the relative importance of information contained in the message (Part V). We have also learnt that sounds help people to indicate their geographical and social origin (sometimes against their will) (Part VI). We will now have a look at three experiments which reveal another aspect of the sounds functioning in speech.

Experiment One. A group of American children, three-to-five-year olds, were shown two boxes, a big one and a small one, and the children were asked: "Which box will you call 'a' and which will be T?"

You have probably guessed it right, the big one was called "a", and the small one was certainly "i". That was evidence of primitive sound symbolism: people associate particular sounds with certain qualities of things, such as sizes, colours and, of course, noises.

Poets are well aware of this aesthetic aspect of sounds, and they select front vowels to give the effect of something light and airy (/ bring fresh showers, for the thirsting flowers, from the seas and the streams, I bear light shades for the trees, when laid in their noonday dreams in the "Cloud" by P.B. Shelly), laterals and nasals for sonority {Those evening bells, those evening bells, how many a tale their music tells, of love and home and that sweet time when last I heard their soothing chime by Th. Moore), as well as swishing, hissing fricatives and banging noises in hush, rush, crush, push, smash, bang, as in E. Alan Poe's And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of the curtain... In folk songs, proverbs, in sayings (to say boo to a goose), and even in the way parents select names for their children one can find that sense of hearing the way sounds come together, and a desire for euphony.

Experiment Two. A sentence was written on the blackboard and read aloud to a group of undergraduates in two ways (as marked by phonetic notation, originally taken from O'Connor and Arnold 1968):

a) It was a 'very dark jxight.

b) It was a very dark ^night.

The audience were asked to attest the two versions as either part of narrative or part of conversation. The first sentence, as the notation prompts, was unambiguously identified as narrative, and the second as conversation. In this case the vowels and consonants were identical but the pitch patterns (and perhaps tempo, rhythm and voice quality) were different: (a) is pronounced with a gradually descending stepping head followed by a low fall (or rise); (b) is read with a high fall (or rise-fall) preceded by a low (or ascending) head. Here prosody functions as one of the style-forming means.

Experiment Three. Prof. O.S. Akhmanova (MGU) and her assistants presented the following text on the blackboard to the audience of undergraduates, teachers and educated native speakers of English:

But the river — chill and weary With the ceaseless raindrops falling On its brown and sluggish waters, With the sound as of a woman, Weeping low in some dark chamber; While the woods, all dark and silent Shrouded in their mists of vapour, Stand like ghosts upon the margin; Silent ghosts of friends neglected —

In a spirit-haunted water Through the land of vain regrets.

After the text was read aloud in a rhythmic, monotonous way, in a husky voice and slow tempo the audience started the argument about its authorship. The names of Longfellow, E.A. Рое, W. Wordsworth and W. Blake were called out. Actually it was an extract from "Three Men in a Boat" by Jerome K. Jerome written as a parody of 18^th century romantic prose (Akhmanova and Minayeva, eds., 1973: 32-33). That was a more sophisticated way of demonstrating the power of rhythm as a style-forming means.

How was the rhythmic effect of free verse created? When written in lines which constitute one of the basic units of rhythm in free verse, the rhythm was further enhanced by the repetition of equal number of accents in a line, recurring level (or levelled-out falling) tones at the end of each line and husky voice quality typical of reciting poems:

But the —river— chill and— dreary

With the —ceaseless—raindrops—falling...

It would be a mistake to completely disregard the choice of words and the rhythm which was originally created by the author, Jerome K. Jerome, to make a parody of the romantic prose style: it certainly was there. However, the visual and oral means of presentation brought it to the fore and enhanced the rhythm.

Summing up what the experiments have demonstrated we can say that speech sounds may possess an aesthetic function. The aesthetic message is conveyed by the following sound means: vowels and consonants of particular quality, pitch and accent patterns, combinations of prosodic rhythm-creating means including voice quality. All the above-mentioned sound means may serve as oral (as opposed to written) style-forming means of narrative and conversation, prose and verse, contrastively.

In the Russian tradition phoneticians dealt with styles of pronunciation, while scholars of style developed the theory of functional styles, very far removed from the pragmatic aims of oral communication. I.R. Galperin's classification of functional styles was applicable to the written variety of language: belles-lettres style (prose, verse, drama), publicistic style, newspaper style, the style of official documents (Galperin 1971, Arnold 1973).

Functional styles were defined as subsystems of language which function in certain spheres of communication and are aimed at a definite effect (to inform, to persuade, to entertain, to establish contact, to impress aesthetically, etc.). Thus language means (lexical, syntactical, phonetic) are selected for a definite, discourse-specific aim.

Russian phoneticians distinguished styles of pronunciation, the basic principle for classifying being the degree of carefulness, the quality of enunciation and the rate of speech. The categories were: full style and colloquial style (Shcherba 1957), full or elevated, neutral, colloquial (Avanesov 1972, Bulanin 1970).

Daniel Jones, the British phonetician, named five styles: rapid familiar, slower colloquial, natural style used when addressing the audience, acquired style of the stage, acquired style of singing {Jones 1956).

In other works attention was focused on the social context of communication act, such as the formality of the situation, as in the American style classification by John S. Kenyon: familiar colloquial, formal colloquial, public speaking, public reading {Kenyon 1946).

David Crystal and Derek Davy include the social status of the speaker as another social constraint which determines the style of speech {Crystal and Davy 1969).

It is important to note here that it is sociolinguistics that explores the social norms of speech, whereas phonostylistics only utilizes them for specific purposes.

The first steps in phonetic style research were concerned with prose read aloud with the degree of spontaneity as the basic principle for style differentiation.

It was only recently that the development of oral forms of communication and discourse analysis (text linguistics) called forth the analysis of public speaking, mass media interview, spontaneous conversation. A num­ber of interesting observations were made with regards to the temporal, rhythmical and melodic organization of each particular style, or register (another common term for "style"), and their smaller subdivisions into genres. It was found, among other things, that oral communication offers a wide range of registers which cannot be directly correlated with functional styles, but rather integrate certain features from various styles. For instance, the academic style of reading a lecture integrates the features of scientific prose, on the one hand, and those of publicistic style, on the other. Of special interest is the style of spontaneous conversation which was ignored in the functional style classification.

In present-day phonetic research natural human conversation, speech production and speech perception occupy the central position.

Speech typology has now been established for the English and Russian languages on similar principles: modes of speech (spoken - written), forms of communication (monologue — dialogue — polilogue), degree of spontaneity (prepared — spontaneous), media and audience (mass media communication — public speech — face-to-face interaction), social relations of speakers (formal — informal).

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