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The Phonetic Style – Forming Means
The speaker is to a definite extent governed by his audience in choice of vocabulary units, grammatical structures, tempo of speech, distinctiveness of articulation, & so on. He has to make sure he is understood. That is why he speaks more carefully when addressing a large audience, or people whom he is not on familiar terms with. Whereas he is less particular about the distinctiveness of his pronunciation when talking to those who know him well enough to “tune in “very easily to his individual manner of speaking. E.g. [‘lemi`si:] for “let me see”, [dn’nou] for “don’t know”, [freidnot] for “afraid not”, [smpm] for “smth”. In a free chat are ‘acceptable’ (though non-obligatory) assimilation & elision, but in other more official situations they are ‘unacceptable’ with those who speak the orthoepic norm. It appears that the use of one phoneme for another as often as not a style-forming means. It may have a stylistic coloring & produce a striking effect.
Elision, reduction & assimilation may, therefore, signal stylistic differences. Take the sentence “We can trust him to do it well” said in 2 different ways:
1. [wi kn'trst im tә 'du it wel]
2. ['wi: 'k n 'trst 'him tu 'du: it wel]
O’Connor states that they belong to different styles: the 1st to colloquial conversation, the 2nd to a political speech delivered to a large audience.
On account of all that, the degree of assimilation, reduction & elision may serve to distinguish phonetic styles.
Besides these segmental features, there are prosodic features which enable people to distinguish between different phonetic styles.
Each speaker has a norm of loudness which may depart from in different circumstances. His speech is generally characterized by a more or less regular usage of certain tones. But there are circumstances when he introduces into his speech tonal variations, variations of pitch levels & ranges specific for definite styles of pronunciation (either to awaken enthusiasm & interest in his audience, or to acquire an authoritative tone, or, v.v., to sound informal, etc).
Each speaker has a norm of speech tempo as well. And he may depart from it in different circumstances. E.g., when reading aloud the tempo is more or less even, when chatting freely the variations in the tempo appear to be considerable. Pauses also help to distinguish different varieties of speech. E,g. the character of pauses shows striking differences between written En-sh read aloud & informal conversation. In the former the pauses are closely related to the grammatical structures, but in conversation they may & do appear in between words in close grammatical connection. Some of the pauses are often replaced by the so called ‘silence-fillers’ such as “I mean”,”sort of”, “kind of”, “well”, “Shall I say” & others. E.g.”It ‘was a… ‘sort of…conversation & it, went like, this…”
Some speakers, when they are greatly involved in what they say & are very emphatic, introduce no pauses until they run out of breath. Their speech sounds abnormal & careless: “He 'said he was 'going but he didn’t do 'anything to get ‘under `way & he came to the ‘door. He ‘stood there like a `dunce. He just `watched ‘other people ‘pack their ‘things. He 'didn’t 'help at `all”.
Experimental investigations show that duration of pauses & tempo of speech depend largely on the extent of creative activity that takes place during speech production. When a native speaker uses a great deal of automatized & well learned sequences, commonplace utterances, professional jargon & clichés, the tempo of his speech is higher than when he has to take serious decisions concerning the content of his speech & its form (the vocabulary, the grammatical structures, the conciseness of expressions). The tempo of speech also depends on whether the audience is large or not. The speaker usually slows down his tempo of speech when addressing a large audience. Thus, each phonetic style is characterized by a specific combination of segmental & prosodic features.
The En-sh phonetic styles have been left unexplored as yet. Most of the research work concentrated mainly on distinctions between different types of speech activities: reading aloud as contrasted to spontaneous conversation. E.g. D.Crystal & D.Davy have noted that informal conversational En-sh as opposed to written En-sh read aloud is characterized by:
a high proportion of hesitation features of all kinds, e.g. [m’m], [әm], [ә];
a substantional amount of overlapping & simultaneous speech;
a great amount of non-obligatory assimilation;
a very high frequency of simple falling tones, a high frequency of ‘stepping down’ head & almost complete absence of ‘stepping up’ head; a high frequency of compound tunes, especially the fall-rise; a frequent use of low rising tones on statements; the occasional use of very emphatic tones such as : rise-fall & fall-rise; a common use of high unstressed syllables especially in the prehead; a tendency to make frequent use of a small number basic prosodic configurations;
a strong tendency to use short intonation groups & to break up lengthy intonation groups;
A frequent use of pauses which occur in places where they are not regular in formal conversation.
D.Davy, when opposing different intonation patterns for conversation & reading aloud, has found that the rising tones are used much oftener in reading.
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