I. Informational Style

This intonational style is sometimes qualified as "formal", "neutral", since in an ideal setting, in its pure manifestation it is least of all influenced or correlated by extralinguistic factors.

Where is it then purely manifested? First of all, in the written variety of an informational narrative read aloud. The majority of these texts are of a purely descriptive character and are simply called descriptive narratives. The written speech, the reading, should not be subjected to the contextual variables and the commonest and "ideal" situation for this register is the reading of such texts in class. They may be labelled as educational informational descriptive narratives.

As is widely known, spoken speech is less imperial, the spoken variety of such texts expresses more personal concern and involvement. They may be presented in different forms: monologues, dialogues, polylogues.

Press reporting and broadcasting, especially the reading of the news coverage over the radio is very close in its manner to this type of the style as the reader tends to sound impartial when reporting routine news or weather forecasts, for example.

It should be noted here that the reading of news coverage in a TV studio differs from the one over the radio as it suggests the attempts on the side of the announcer to address the viewers, so some emotional evaluation may appear in the information.

The news bulletin and broadcast talk have both written and spoken existences which are of equal importance for the simple reason that they were written specially to be read aloud. The in formational style includes other spheres of communication: business and legal intercourse, the reading of administrative documents and so on.

The degree of formality in the character of participants' relationship in different types of the informational style presentation may smooth the borderline between them. Thus it would be wrong to identify this style as formal, because the degree of formality may vary. As it was stated earlier, the contours of the in-tonational styles presentation in speech reality have not been very definitely outlined yet. So the most informal realization of any kind of information in the form of a dialogue may lead to a conversational style, and, respectively, extra formal sounding of information may lead to an academic style talk and so on. f We shall limit our description of the style to two common types: educational information and press reporting/broadcasting. We would like to specify here that types of style, i.e. certain spheres of discourse would be called registers, the term being widely used abroad in a broader sense, often meant as style in general. The table below shows the correlation between the informational intonational style registers, and speech typology.

Table1

Roughly speaking, any variety of the language, both written and spoken, may be presented either by reading or speaking in a prepared or spontaneous way in a formal or informal manner.

Spheres of discourse (Registers)	Varieties of the language and forms of communication
Written variety of the language (Reading)	Spoken variety of the language (Speaking)
Monologue	Dialogue	Monologue	Dialogue	Polylogue
public	non-public	public	non-public	public	non-public	public	non-public	public	non-public
Educational information	Reading in class	Reading to a listener	Reading in dass	—	Speaking public	Talking to a listener	Talking in class	Just talking	Round-table talks	—
Press reporting and broadcasting	Reading news coverage over the radio, TV; reading newspaper in class	Reading newspaper to a listener			Talking on events over the TV	Talking to a listener	Commenting on the events, discussing them	Just discussing the events	Round-table talks of commentators

We would like to attempt now to suggest certain spheres of discourse in which the informational intonational style (IIS) could be heard in relation to forms of communication and the number of participants involved.

Now, when we have more or less definitely outlined the contours of the style, our next step will be to analyse prosodic characteristics of this particular intonational style. As it was stated in Chapter I, the following parameters of prosodic analysis should be applied to a text: pitch (variations of pitch direction, pitch level, pitch range), loudness, tempo (the rate of the utterance and pausation). It also includes rhythm and timbre as they have very specific suprasegmental expression of various emotional, expressive and evaluative overtones.

It would be fair to admit here that when faced with a text of some kind — what appears to be a mass of coordinated data — a starting point for analysis is often difficult to choose.

As it was suggested above, the ideal start is an informational, purely descriptive text, most commonly heard in class. We think that it is a basic-measuring rod for the types of styles of other situations. The analysis of it here is carried out by the procedure of systematic phonological opposition: the phonostylistic organization of reading will be systematically compared with the spoken version (in the forms of a monologue and a dialogue). The main reason for this is that it seemed to be dictated by the requirements of close study of the specimens in comparison since the two varieties of the language differ greatly in sound and have their own distinctive specifications of pronunciation and the correspondence between them should be looked at.

The description of the informational intonational style will proceed in the following order:

I. Informational educational texts.

1. The phonostylistic analysis of the written descriptive nar ratives.

2. The analysis of the spoken variety of such texts.

3. The opposition of spoken and written speech produced in the form of a monologue.

4. The analysis of characteristic phonostylistic features of dia logues on the topic suggested in the monologues.

5. The opposition of the phonostylistic parameters of a mo nologue and a dialogue.

П. Press reporting and broadcasting.

1. The description and analysis of characteristic prosodic features of a news bulletin reading over the radio.

2. The opposition of the news bulletin and an informationaldescriptive text reading characteristics.

Ш. The conclusion.

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