The Invariant of Phonostylistic Characteristics of Publicistic Oratorial Speeches

Table 10

Timbre	dignified, self-assured, concerned and personally involved; n variety of attitudinal arid modal expressions in the voice
Delimitation	phonopassages — phrases — intonation groups
Style-marking pro-sodic features	Loudness	enormously increased, ranging from forte to fortissimo;.sometimes instances of diminished loudness are observed to bring out words and phrases of paramount importance and produce certain psychological effect
Ranges and levels	greatly varied; the predominant use of wide ranges witltin the phonopassage; a very high level of the start of the initial intonation groups
Rate	moderately slow; the public speaker slows down to bring out communicatively important centres; less important information entails acceleration of speed
Pauses	definitely long between the passages; a great number of breath-taking pauses; pausation is commonly explicable in semantic and syntactic terms; interpausal segments are rather short, thus phrases may be overloaded by pauses of different length; another characteristic feature of this register is a rather frequent stop of pho-natiori before the emphatic semantic centre; it serves as a means of bringing out words and phrases; voiceless hesitation pauses occur to produce the effect of apparent spontaneity, "rhetorical silence" is often used to exert influence on the public
Rhythm	properly organized; within the speech segments rhythmic groups have recurrent alternation, which produces the acoustic effect of strict rhythmicality
The accentuation of semantic centres	Terminal tones	mostly emphatic, especially on emotionally underlined semantic centres; in non-final intonational groups falling-rising tones are frequent; terminal tones are contrasted to distinguish between the formal segments of speech and less formal ones (illustrations, examples, jokes, and so on)
Pre-nudear patterns	common use of the descending sequence of stressed syllables; a large proportion of falling and stepping heads, frequently broken by accidental rises to increase the emphasis; another common "rhetorical trick" is the tonal subordination when semantically arid communicatively important intonation groups contrast with their neighbours by all prosodic features; so the high level head may be alternated with the low level head, especially in enumerations
The contrast between accented and unaccented segments	not great
Paralin-guistic features	<i great number of paralinguistic effects, kinesic components — facial expressions, bodily movements, gestures — subjected to the main purpose of the publicistic discourse: to influence the audience, involve it into the talk and to exert the ex-peeled response from it

Publicistic speakers are usually very enthusiastic about what they say and how they say, so they may go to extremes by enormously increasing the loudness and alternate it with whisper or by pronouncing very long breath groups and suddenly interrupt the phonation by using the rhetorical silence. These and other prosodic contrasts produce great effects and captivate the attention and interest of the listener.

The greatest single stylistic characteristic of publicistic speeches is the large amount of parallelisms on any level, prosodic features including.

All the above-mentioned general characteristics serve to produce a complex vocal effect called "oration", designed to make the listeners respond to the publicistic speech-maker. So a clear phonological distinction can be drawn between this intonational style and others in terms of markedly different prosodic structures but there is no clear boundary between certain types of lectures, publicistic speeches and declamatory performances.

We have tried to describe here only one register of the style. There are certainly other spheres of discourse — spontaneous speeches at the meetings, debates, theatrical oratorial procedures at parties, anniversaries and so on. They will certainly differ greatly on the prosodic level, but'the volitional function of intonation, expressed by the contrast of all prosodic parameters, will always be in the foreground and mark the publicistic style.

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