Problems of phonostylistics 1 страница

Chapter I

As was mentioned in the introduction, pronunciation is by no means homogeneous. It varies under the influence of numerous factors. These factors lie quite outside any possibility of signalling linguistic meaning so it is appropriate to refer to these factors as extralinguistic. The chapter that follows is based on the idea that information about stylistic variations in learning, understanding and producing language is directly useful for the design, execution and evaluation of teaching phonetics. The branch of phonetics most usually applied for such information is phonostylistics. It is the purpose of this chapter to offer brief, readable and scholarly introduction to the main themes and topics covered by current phonostylistic studies.

We should point out right at the beginning that phonostylistics is a rapidly developing and controversial field of study though a great deal of research work has been done in it. It would not be accurate to say that phonostylistics is a new branch of phonetics.. It is rather a new way of looking at phonetic phenomena. Linguists were until recently not aware of this way of analysis and awareness came only as a result of detailed analysis of spoken speech.

Before we go on to describe in detail what the problems and tasks of phonostylistics are we should want to give you some understanding of what gave a mighty impulse to this new way of looking at phonetic phenomena. The point is that during the first half of our century linguists have shown interest in written form of the language and so the emphasis in language study was laid on analysing written speech. It is only during the last thirty-five years that the situation has changed. It may be said that it was the invention of the tape-recorder and other technical aids that was the real turning point in phonetics and linguistics in general. Linguists got a good opportunity of studying the other form of language realization — spoken speech — the variety which had hitherto been largely or completely ignored. It is not only the absence of mechanical aids which accounts for the lack of linguistic research that has been carried out into this variety of language and the procedure difficulty of obtaining reliable data to investigate. There is, however, a further reason. Until quite recently theory and research on language was based on the assumption that it is only the written form of language realization that can serve a reliable object of investigation, while the spoken form is not worthy of scientific analysis because it produces deviations from the literary norm.

Nobody would want to deny the fact that spoken speech is the primary medium of language expression. So when linguists became involved in investigating language in use they realized that language is not an isolated phenomenon, it is a part of society. In real life people find themselves in various and numerous situations. In these situations language is used appropriately, i.e. people select from their total linguistic repertoires those elements which match the needs of particular situations.

This fact changed the whole approach to the language. Rather than viewing language as an object with independent existence, a thing to be described for its own sake, it became evident that it must be seen as a tool, a means to an end outside itself. That end is, of course, communication and it is only in the context of communicative situation that the essential properties of a linguistic system can be discovered and analysed.

So it is taken to be reasonably obvious that much of what people say depends directly or indirectly on the situation they are in. The nature of this dependency is fairly complicated and it would be quite unrealistic to attempt to analyse all aspects of it. We would like to point out two things that matter for the description that follows and stand out clearly. On the one hand, variations of language in different situations it is used in are various and numerous but, on the other hand, all these varieties have much in common as they are realizations of the same system. That means that there are regular patterns of variation in language, or, in other words, language means which constitute any utterance are characterized by a certain pattern of selection and arrangement.

The principles of this selection and arrangement, the ways of combining the elements form what is called "the style". Style integrates language means constructing the utterance, and at the same time differs one utterance from another.

It must be noted that the category of style is not new in linguistics. The branch of linguistics that is primarily concerned with the problems of functional styles is called functional stylis-tics. Stylistics is usually regarded as a specific division of linguistics, as a sister science, concerned not with the elements of the language as such but with their expressive potential.

We should point out here that we are not going into details as to the problems of stylistics. We shall only try to show how phonostylistics overlaps with functional stylistics and to explain why there is no simple correspondence between functional and phonetic styles.

It has been suggested that a functional style can be defined as a functional set of formal patterns into which language means are arranged in order to transmit information. A considerable number of attempts have been made in recent years to work out a classification of functional styles. But in spite of this fact it is still an open question in linguistics. In other words, there is no universal classification that is admitted by all analysts.

This fact can be accounted for by the following reasons. As was pointed out earlier, language events take place in situations. The factors that determine the usage of certain language means are quite numerous and various. Their interdependence and interconnection are of complex nature. Consequently it is difficult to decide which of the factors are of primary importance and should be considered the most reliable criterion.

In addition, language as a means of communication is known to have several functions. In the well-known conception suggested by academician V.V.Vinogradov (10), three functions are distinguished, that is the function of communication (colloquial style), the function of informing (business, official and scientific styles) and the emotive function (publicistic style and the belles-lettres style). Classification of this kind actually reflects some of the aspects of stylistic phenomena. However, the criterion of distinguishing styles does not seem accurate enough. It is obvious that what is called the emotive function is the general task of lit erature but not of style. Besides, the language of fiction should not be treated on the same footing with the functional style of a language.

The other two above-mentioned functions cannot serve as a basis for distinguishing functional styles because there is no simple correspondence between the function and the style. For example, scientific style is used not only for informing people but also for communication of scientists in discussions, talks, speeches and so on. Colloquial speech, in its turn, always combines those two functions. What is to be taken into account here is the difficulty of distinguishing those two functions, which is one of the basic problems. In fact communication is the process of exchanging information. The actual difference between communicating and informing can be marked primarily in a dialogue — monologue opposition.

As was mentioned above, there exist various classifications of functional styles. The terms that are most commonly dealt with are: scientific style, publicistic style, business style, belles-lettres style and colloquial style. The latter functions predominantly in everyday oral speech, though most scholars share the opinion that there is no simple correspondence between the styles and the forms of language realization.

We should note here that in the process of studying the characteristics of functional styles phonetic level of analysis has been completely ignored.

However, nobody would want to deny now that oral speech has its own specific characteristics and the quality of various forms and kinds of oral speech is by far larger than in written speech. So it is quite clear that description and comparison of all these variations is a matter of severe complexity as, on the one hand, each form is specific and, on the other hand, there are regular patterns of partial likeness between them. Now one thing is evident, that the sets of phonetic style-forming features do not correspond to functional styles in pure linguistic approach. They are characterized by different qualities.

We have mentioned above that certain nonlinguistic features can be correlated with variations in language use. The latter can be studied on three levels: phonetic, lexical and grammatical. The first level is the area of phonostylistics.

Summarizing, we may say that phonostylistics studies the way phonetic means are used in this or that particular situation which exercises the conditioning influence of a set of factors which are referred to as extralinguistic. The aim of phonostylistics is to analyse all possible kinds of spoken utterances with the main purpose of identifying the phonetic features, both segmen-tal and suprasegmental, which are restricted to certain kinds of contexts, to explain why such features have been used and to classify them into categories based upon a view of their function.

Before describing phonetic style-forming factors it is obviously necessary to try to explain what is meant by extralinguistic situation. We should note here that if a systematic exhaustive and ultimately realistic view of phonostylistic differentiation of oral speech is to be attained an orderly analysis of the communicative extralinguistic situation appears to be mandatory. The analysis shows that it can be defined by three components, that is purpose, participants, setting. These components distinguish situation as the context within which interaction (communication) occurs. Thus a speech situation can be defined by the cooccurrence of two or more interlocutors related to each other in a particular way, having a particular aim of communicating, communicating about a particular topic in a particular setting.

Firstly, a situation is connected with the purpose and the topic of the communication. For us purpose can be defined as the motor which sets the chassis of setting and participants going, it is interlinked with the other two components in a very intricate way. The purpose which is of interest to us here directs the activities of the participants throughout a situation to complete a task. Such purposes can be viewed in terms of general activity types and in terms of the activity type plus specific subject matter.

There appear to be a considerable number of quite general types of activities, for example: working, teaching, learning, conducting a meeting, chatting, playing a game, etc. Such activity types are socially recognized as units of interaction that are identifiable.

It is reasonable to assume that activity types available to members of a society are not simply random lists of all possibilities but are organized into clusters of activities that seem to be of the same order. So we might suggest that academic activities such as university lecturing, high-levelled school teaching, scientific reports, discussions, etc. as related to activity types are opposed to other groups of activity types, such as, for example, casual chat, whether of dentist and patient to schoolmates or neighbours. (One of the bases of such an opposition might be the degree of spontaneity or degree of preparedness of speech that would reveal clusters of pronunciation markers.)

It should be noted that activity type alone does not give an adequate account of the purpose in a situation. It only specifies the range of possible purposes that participants will orient toward in the activity but not which specific one will be involved. People do not set out to lecture or to chat on something, they intend to lecture on physics, or literature, or art, to chat on weather or a book they have read. The notion of purpose requires the specification of contents at a more detailed level than that of activity type. This we shall call "subject matter" or "topic" and we shall assume isomorphy between subject matter of the speech activity and topic of speech ignoring such situations when, for example, participants might be cooking while chatting about their work. But we should like to point out here that subject matter, in large part, will determine the lexical items encountered, the pronunciation being very slightly affected. That is why when the study of functional variants of pronunciation is concerned it is activity types that form the notion of the purpose of communication.

Now let's consider another component of situation that is participants. Speech varies with participants in numerous ways. It is a marker of various characteristics of the individual speakers as well as of relationships between participants. Characteristics of individuals may be divided into those which appear to characterize the individual as an individual and those which characterize the individual as a member of a significant social grouping. The individualistic characteristics are not a primary focus of this volume. So let us turn our attention to social relationships. The taking on of roles and role relations is commonly confounded with settings and purposes. When Dr. Smith, for instance, talks like a doctor and not like a father or someone's friend it is likely to be when he is in a surgery or a hospital and is inquiring about the health of a patient or discussing new drugs with a colleague. Such confounding may well be more true of occupational roles than of non-occupational roles such as strangers or friends, adults or older and younger children, etc.

Usually age of participants is also an important category for social interaction. Among other things age is- associated with the role structure in the family and in social groups, with the assignment of authority and status, and with the attribution of different levels of competence. The speech behaviour of a person not only conveys information about his or her own age but also about the listener or the receiver of the verbal message. Thus, old people speak and are spoken to in a different way from young people.

For instance, an elderly person usually speaks in a high-pitched voice, people generally use higher pitch-levels speaking to younger children..

There is another factor, which is included into the "participants" component of a speech situation. That is the sex of the speaker. Sex differences in pronunciation are much more numerous than differences in grammatical form. For instance, there is a consistent tendency for women to produce more standard or rhetorically correct pronunciation which is generally opposed to the omission of certain speech sounds. Girls and women pronounce the standard realization of the verb ending in -ing (reading, visiting, interesting) more frequently than boys and men who realize -in (readin, visitin, interestin) more often; female speakers use a more "polite" pattern of assertive intonation ('Yes. 'Yes, I know.) while male speakers use a more deliberate pattern (vFes. Yes. I know.); women tend to use certain intonation patterns that men usually do not (notably "surprise" pattern of high fall-rises and others).

It should be noted here that the capacity of phonetic means to realize sex differences is undoubtedly of immense importance and interest. But further clarification of rather intricate questions can only come from more observations of living speech and would naturally require a detailed examination of a much larger corpus.

Talking about "participants" component we should add one more characteristic that needs consideration. That is the emotional state of the speaker at the moment of speech production which is likely to reveal pronunciation markers which would be a fascinating problem of research.

The last component we have to consider is called setting, or scene. It is defined by several features. The first of them is a physical orientation of participants. This is to some extent determined by the activity they are engaged in; thus in a lecture the speaker stands at some distance from and facing the addressees whereas in a private chat they are situated vis-a-vis each other. It is quite obvious now that speech over an intercom and speech in face-to-face communication is obviously phonologically distinguishable in a number of ways.

Scenes may be arranged along dimensions: public — private, impersonal — personal, polite,— casual, high-cultured — low-cultured, and many other value scales. In large part these diverse scales seem to be subsumed — for participants as well as analysts — under one bipolar dimension of formal — informal. The kind of language appropriate to scenes on the formal or "high" end of the scale is then differentiated from that appropriate to those on the informal or "low" end. From the acquaintance with English and Russian we can speculate that such differentiation follows universal principles, so that high forms of language share certain properties, such as elaboration of syntax and lexicon, phonological precision and rhythmicality, whereas "low" forms share properties including elipsis, repetition, speed and slurring. If this is so we may expect pronunciation features to be markers of the scene or at least of its position in the formal — informal dimension.

We have attempted to show what is generally understood by an extralinguistic situation and what components may be considered as its constituents. It is, perhaps, easy to see how numerous the main factors determining variation in language usage are. What we are interested in here is variations of phonetic means. A framework for understanding and describing them has to deal with the constant and decisive features of the situational circumstances of language event that are relevant for phonetic level of analysis. It would be true to say that this problem was given a good deal of attention and there is a lot of data obtained with the help of special investigation. It allows us now to single out, a number of factors which result in phonostylistic varieties. They are:

the purpose, or the aim of the utterance;

the speaker's attitude;

the form of communication;

the degree of formality;

the degree of spontaneity (or the degree of preparedness or the reference of the oral text to a written one).

It should be mentioned right here that the purpose or the aim of the utterance may be called a phonetic style-forming factor. All other factors cause modifications within this or that style and th'at is why may be referred to as style-modifying factors.

There is one more thing that should be pointed out here. All these factors are interdependent and interconnected. They are singled out with the purpose of describing phonetic phenomena so that to give a good idea of how the system works.

Now we shall try to consider each of the above-mentioned factors and to explain what sort of phonetic variations may correlate with each of them.

The first factor we should consider is the purpose of the utterance and the subject matter. As was mentioned earlier, we should assume isomorphy between these two constituents. As the subject matter in large part determines the lexical items, it is the aim of the utterance that affects pronunciation. So in this respect the aim could be spoken of as the strategy of the language user and so it may be called a style-forming factor. On the phonetic level there are variations related to describe what language is being used for in the situation: is the speaker trying to persuade? to exhort? to discipline? Is he teaching, advertising, amusing, controlling, etc.? Each of the above-mentioned variants makes the speaker select a number of functional phonetic means with the purpose of making the realization of the aim more effective. In terms of phonostylistics we may analyse various phonetic ways of reflecting the speaker's purposive role in the situation in which the text occurred.

Another extralinguistic factor most often referred to is the speaker's attitude to the situation or to what he is saying or hearing. It is common knowledge that a communicative situation is part of a human being's everyday life situation So it is natural for a language user to consider the situation from his point of view, revealing his personal interest and participation in what he is saying. The thing he is talking about may satisfy him or not, may please him or not, may elicit his positive or negative response, his emotions. This factor forms a complex bundle with another characteristic feature of oral speech. It is no new notion that any oral text is addressee-oriented. This means that the listener is always concrete, no matter whether communication takes place in public or private atmosphere. This factor can well be said to greatly differ oral form of language realization from its written form. In sum, this factor can be considered a relevant feature of oral speech. Its most common linguistic realization is intonation varieties which can be numerous like varieties of attitudes and emotions an individual can express in various life situations. Concluding we might say that subjective colouring of oral speech is one of its most integral characteristics.

Considering the form of communication we should say that nature of participation in the language event results in two pos sible varieties: a monologue and a dialogue. It should be mentioned here that a distinction between a monologue and a dialogue is a fairly conditioned one but we note this distinction for a number of reasons.

Monologuing is the speaking by one individual in such a way as to exclude the possibility of interruption by others. Dialoguing (conversing) is speaking in such a way as to invite the participation of others. It is quite possible for one person to communicate with another and to be the only speaker. Similarly two people can monologue at each other. Monologuing is taken to be the user's medium relationship in those speech situations in which the other people present do not join in or at least are not meant to, except, perhaps, to show approval or disapproval. From the linguistic point of view only one feature is considered to be relevant, i.e. the length of the utterance. Monologues are usually more extended. They are also characterized by more phonetic, lexical and grammatical cohesion. This means that monologues usually have more apparent continuity and self-containedness than conversation. Phonetic organization of either of the two varieties cannot he analogical since each kind is characterized by specific usage of language means of all the three levels.

If we look upon a dialogue and a monologue from psycholin-guistic point of view it turns out that the latter are more complex units. It can be proved by the fact that people who find themselves abroad learn dialoguing quite easily, while monologuing requires special training even in the native language. There are a lot of people who use their native language while dialoguing quite adequately but who fail to produce an extended utterance in case they are supposed to.

Among the social factors determining the usage of stylistic means it is the formality of situation which is very often referred to.

It is obvious that the process of speaking is very often a recognition of social roles and relationship. The interaction of individuals depends upon their learning and accepting the roles of social behaviour. A certain individual may possess a certain rank in an organization which entitles him to be addressed in a certain fashion by his subordinates, in another way by his equals and in a third way by his superiors. So to come to terms with how roles and relations are realized in language we speak of formality of discourse. Formality reflects how the addresser (the speaker) in teracts with the addressee (the listener). The relationship is the situational category, the extralinguistic reality.

Formality results from mutual relations among participants in language events. When the relationship is considered on the personal axis, variations ranging from extreme degrees of formality to extreme degrees of informality are relevant. So we might say that spoken language shapes relationships, it defines and identifies them, and it is the category of formality which marks speaking "the right" kind of language.

Considering a communicative situation from the point of view of sociolinguistics we would have to admit that it makes the language user realize the importance and necessity of stylistic demands for his language consciousness. So the dichotomy formal — informal (official — unofficial) can be understood here as the absence or presence of socially realized necessity to follow certain rules while generating an utterance. Informal communication does not make the speaker use obligatory forms, it allows to use them. In discussing this factor we have to admit that the category of formality is generally included into the set of style-differentiating factors applied. It suggests that a language user possesses the ability to speak in different styles. It is the case with people whose professions are highly verbal ones. Such people usually have a very cultural background. In the opposite case the linguistic behaviour of a speaker in a formal situation does not differ from his behaviour in an informal situation.

The influence of this factor upon the phonetic form of speech is revealed by variations of rate of articulation. So we might say that the variable along which styles of speaking differ is mainly sounds. In a formal situation the language user tends to make his speech distinct, thorough and precise. His conscious attention to the form of production makes him choose the full style of pronunciation. The notion of the appropriateness of speaking slow enough is presumably part of the cultural code which insists that it is rude to talk fast and less explicit in such situation. In an informal situation he would prefer less explicit and more rapid form because this form would be more appropriate and would function efficiently as a mode of communication.

It would be a vast oversimplification to assume that there are only two varieties of pronunciation. There are, certainly, many more of them. Indeed there is an infinite number and they have no definable boundaries, each merges imperceptibly into the next.

The two polar varieties that have been mentioned above illustrate the role of degree of formalily as an extralinguistic category.

We should point out here that there is another factor which is very often referred to as the one related to degree of formality. What we mean is the quantity of addressees. This factor determines the distinction of public and non-public oral texts (14, c. 82). Speech is qualified as public when a speaker is listened to by a group of people. Non-public communication occurs in face-to-face situations. It would be fair to mention that there are no direct correlations between the formality of situation and public — non-public character of presentation.

Linguistic realization of the formality on both segmental and suprasegmental levels is very important for a student of another language. He brings to his-learning task all the habits and knowledge of his mother tongue and his culture. Learning a foreign language involves suspending these and acquiring others. The student, however, will often continue to interpret situations as he would in his own culture. In other words his grasp of formality of situation is incomplete. He may often have a formal way and perhaps a relatively informal one but he may not know the gradation in between the extremes. The result may be an un-appropriate usage of intonation structure with the wrong meaning. For example, in Russian the leave-taking До свидания can be pronounced both with low rising and low falling tone, which sounds neutral, while in English Good-bye! pronounced with a low falling tone sounds fairly rude, while rising tone makes it neutral.

Analysing extralinguistic factors we should add some more to the above-mentioned ones. They are: the speaker's individuality, temporal provenance, social provenance, range of intelligibility, sex and age of the speaker. The first thing to know about them is that they are incidental, concomitant features. They are characteristic of a language user and can not vary, with very little exception, like all the above-mentioned ones. So they are not deliberately chosen by the speaker at the time of text production, though they may very well serve as his identifying features, thus from this point of view they may be considered informative.

One of the most important style-modifying factors is the degree of spontaneity. So if we examine the situations in whichpeople speak rather than write from the point of view of psychology we can distinguish between those in which they are speaking spontaneously as opposed to those in which they are speaking non-spontaneously as the actor and the lecturer are most often doing. The types of speech situations which lead to spontaneous speech include classroom teaching, television and radio interviews, sporting commentaries on radio and television of an event actually taking place, conversation between experts in a particular field of everyday conversations. We should realize, of course, that between two poles of spontaneity there are a number of more delicate distinctions. For example, the sporting commentator has studied notes and has described this sort of thing before; the people whose professions are highly verbal ones such as the journalist, the politician, the teacher, the lawyer and the stage entertainer become accustomed to producing spontaneous texts and are very often called upon to speak spontaneously about the same area of experience. This means that although they have no written text in front of them there are elements of preparation and repetition in their speaking performances which give them some of the characteristics of written modes. These characteristics are most clearly identified at the phonetic level of analysis.

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