Summary. Sound symbolismis based on associations between speech sounds and qualities of things and the way people utilize them

Sound symbolism is based on associations between speech sounds and qualities of things and the way people utilize them. The aesthetic aspect of sounds is employed by writers and poets, and even by ordinary people in selecting their children's names for euphony. Front/back, close/open, rounded/unrounded features of vowels as well as the plosive and fricative noises of consonants may motivate the choice. In prosody there are con­ventional forms of pitch range widening and narrowing, tempo slowing down or speeding up, voice quality becoming more resonant or husky. Pro-sodic and segmental style-forming means are graded according to the degree of formality and aim of communication.

Reading verse, for instance, is conventionally slow in the rate of delivery with exaggerated rhythmic beat of accents, levelled out tones and pauses to mark off the lines which are also shaped by pitch declination; voice quality is normally husky. Classical verse may have as many as 15 features which create rhythm, while free verse may have only three of which lines, feet and pauses are obligatory.

Styles of pronunciation: full and non-full, or colloquial (Russian tradition).

Functional styles classification is applicable to the written variety of the language: belles-lettres style (prose, verse, drama), publicistic style, newspaper style, the style of official documents.

Most of the British and American oral style classifications include: familiar colloquial, formal colloquial, public speaking. Thus the classifying principles are formality of the situation and social relations between speakers. Discourse (text) linguistics addresses the problems of oral forms of communications such as public speaking, mass media interview, spontaneous conversation. The principles of spontaneity and speech monitoring are particularly focused on. Linguistics is exploring the ways our mind works in creating texts. Natural human conversation, therefore, is bound to occupy the central position in recent research.

Rhythm is regularity, or periodicity, of similar events. Speech rhythm is connected with biological rhythms of heartbeat and breathing. Rhythm was first described in poetics and included such features of verse as meter, rhyme, foot, line, stanza, lexical repetition, syntactical parallelism, assonance, alliteration. The basic rhythmic units of verse are foot, line and stanza.

Rhythmic units form a hierarchy: each bigger unit consists of smaller units. In reading or speaking all the prosodic features of pitch, intensity, tempo, pause and voice quality are involved: they indicate the boundaries and pitch patterns of the units.

Units of rhythm are style-specific: in speaking or prose reading the basic rhythm units are: rhythmic group, intonation group and supraphrasal unity. Thus practically identical units are named differently in verse and prose. The smallest rhythm unit is foot (or rhythmic group). In English it consists of one stressed syllable and may have one or more unstressed syllables to follow the stressed one: Sss (the enclitic tendency). Other languages, such as Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese), have a proclitic structure of foot: /ssS/ssS/.

Units of rhythm are units of meaning: there is correlation between a foot and a word, an intonation group and a clause, a speech paragraph and a theme.

The functions of rhythm are primarily structuring: delimiting and cohesive. Of special importance is the aesthetic function of rhythm which appeals to the sense of harmony. Rhythm creates perceptual isochrony of its units with the length of units varying within certain ranges, limited for each particular unit. English and Russian rhythms are stress-timed, while other languages have syllable-timed rhythms with a relatively equal time of syllable duration. Recent research has evidence that this phenomenon is based on the vowel and consonant composition of syllables: in English long or "heavy" syllables are made of long vowels and diphthongs (or a short vowel plus a consonant) and they attract stress which makes them more prominent perceptually. In British English the duration contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables is great (1.7:1).

For practical purposes of self-presentation one has to consider the most common styles of oral presentation today. They are: face-to-face interaction (informal and formal), telephone conversation, interview, public speech. On all occasions one has to accord the aim of communication (to inform, to persuade, to impress, to entertain) with the linguistic means, including the choice of careful or casual styles of speaking with the appropriate means of prosody, such as tempo, loudness, pitch range and voice quality. Body language and cultural awareness of speech etiquette are very important too.

It is very useful to practise iconic intonations of cliches which are acceptable reactions to standard situations and to certain (verbal) contexts.

Timing and an ability to vary one's voice make the public speech effective. Contrasting thesis and argument, a statement and an illustration are useful devices. Other features of the public speech are: three-part structure, rhetorical questions, repetitions, parallelisms, well-formed periods with enumerations. Key words are brought out by pitch change: high-falling and falling-rising tones are most common. The performance needs careful preparation. Practice gives confidence and confidence means success.

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