The Invariant of Phonostylistic Characteristics of an Academic Style Reading

 

 

 

Timbre		authoritative, imposing, edifying, instructive, self-assured
Delimitation		phonopassages — phrases — intonational groups
Style-marking prosodic features	Loudness	increased, sometimes to forte
	Levels and ranges	remarkably varied with the passage segments; gradual decrease within the supraphrasal unity
	Rate	normal, slow on the most important parts of the lecture (rules, conclusions, examples); rate is as flexible as the lecturer wishes it to be
	Pauses	rather long, especially between the phonopassag­es; a large proportion of pauses serving to bring out communicatively important parts of utteranc­es; occasional use of breath-taking pauses
	Rhythm	properly organized, especially while giving the rules, reading the laws, drawing conclusions, etc.
Accen­tuation of se­mantic centres	Terminal tones	high proportion of compound terminal tones (High Fall + Low Rise; Fall-Rise, Rise-Fall-Rise); a great number of high categoric falls
	Pre-nuclear patterns	frequent use of stepping and falling heads; alterna­tion of descending and ascending heads, especially in enumerations
	The contrast between the accented and unaccented segments	not great

3. A scientific style talk presenter sounds much louder than an informational style reader as any public oration is produced face to face with a fairly-sized audience. Instances of diminished loudness are observed only in bringing out phrases expressing forgetfulness, uncertainty, word-searching.

4. The prosodic features of the academic style reading are rather varied as intonation correlates the lecturer's attempts to

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get his meaning across clearly and to obtain the balance be­tween formality and informality. This variety is created by:

a) The alternation of pauses, types of heads, pitch levels and terminal tones.

b) The ample use of variations and contrasts of the tempo to help the listener to differentiate between the more and less im­portant parts of the overall flow of speech. The speaker normally slows down when he introduces rules, terms, scientific laws, etc. This makes them stand out.

5. The rhythmical organization of a scientific text is properly balanced by the alternation of all prosodic features which gives the acoustic impression of "rhythmicality".

6. High falling and falling-rising terminal tones are widely used as a means of both logical and contrastive emphasis.

Now in conclusion we would like to say that when we per­form within the academic (scientific) intonational style a certain amount of variation of all phonostylistic characteristics is a must to achieve the goal of communication, but care should be taken not to overdo this. If a segment is overloaded with contrasts of tempo, loudness and pitch and the speaker uses all sorts of "ora-torial tricks", then it means that the lecturer performs in a differ­ent style with appropriate prosody and we have the transposi­tion from one style to another.

We have described in this chapter only one register of the ac­ademic style. Unfortunately other spheres of discourse and inter­course in this style have not been fully investigated yet; so this field for experiments is still open and awaits its investigators.

 

Publicistic Style

The term "publicistic" serves for many kinds of oratorial ac­tivities, that is why this intonational style is often called "oratori­al". It is a very broad label because there is a great deal of over­lap between academic, publicistic and declamatory style when the basic aim of the speaker is to extend persuasive and emo­tional influence on the listeners and, of course, volitional and desiderative information is predominant in the texts. But in publi­cistic speeches it is achieved not only through argumentation as in the academic style or imagery as in the declamatory style, but

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through all sorts of direct oratorial performances. These perform­ances are designed to entertain the public thus accomplishing the purpose of imposing the speaker's ideas on listeners.

This is especially noticeable in public political speeches of some politicians whose appeals to the nation are overloaded with all sorts of oratorial tricks and characterized by various con­trasts in all prosodic features to produce a complex vocal effect, thus making addresses more effective.

So publicistic style is commonly called by phonostylists voli­tional and desiderative. Its manifestation can be heard in politi­cal, judicial, oratorial speeches, in sermons, parliamentary de­bates, at congresses, meetings, press conferences and so on. We will admit here, however, that this style will be outlined here very briefly, since would-be teachers of English will not use it ac­tively in their teaching experience and need it only for compre­hension.

It has long been believed that oratorial skills need special training. Therefore special schools of public speech makers, of professional training were established throughout the centuries and all over the world. It is evident, of course, that intonation has always been of primary importance there and surely needed accurate training and exaggeration to achieve excessive emo­tional colouring. The use of prosodic contrasts makes the speak­er sometimes go to extremes and become needlessly dramatic.

Another important feature of publicistic style speeches is that they are never spontaneous. It is generally accepted that any professional talk is a "voyage", and it should be charted, but it is strongly advisable not to use notes during the speech perform­ance because they destroy the listener's interest and the ideas, suggestions and illustrations of the speaker will not come drifting to the audience. Thus it should be borne in mind that a publicis­tic speech is mostly always written but rehearsed and read aloud, cultivating, however, the apparent spontaneity to avoid the impression of complete preparedness.

As was stated above, the purpose of oratorial exercises is to stimulate, inspire the listeners, to arouse enthusiasm in them; so the kinesic accompaniment — facial expressions, bodily move­ments, gestures — is extremely important and assists to achieve the task, to put heart into the talking. On the other hand, the proper response of the audience inspires the speaker and stimu­lates him for an ever more successful talk.

One would always expect a political and judicial speech to be

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given in a forceful and lively manner because the effects of fail­ing to be convincing is likely to be severe for speakers, politi­cians and judges especially. Consequently they use a great vari­ety of generally accepted for this register grammatical construc­tions, lexical means and intonation patterns, which identify texts as belonging to this type of speech.

These features are absolutely predictable because they are markers of this style. For example, a very notable and common stylistic feature used here is parallelism — the repetition of syn­tactical, lexical and prosodic structures.

Basically political speeches, addresses of Governments tend to be very formal, so a great number of "high-flown" phrases, set expressions are common to this type of the style as is seen from an imaginary political speech taken as a model from the Ad­vanced English Course:

The time has almost come, ladies and gentlemen, when the Gov­ernment must ask you — the electors of Great Britain — to renew its mandate. It is as a member of the Government that I stand be­fore you this evening, and the task I have set myself is to review many things which the Government has achieved since the last General Election and to outline the path which we hope to follow in the future, when, as I am confident will be the case, you re­turn us to office with an even greater parliamentary majority.

No one will deny that what we have been able to do in the past five years is especially striking in view of the crisis which we inherited from the previous Government. With wages and prices spiralling upwards; with a record trade deficit of hundreds of mil­lions of pounds, and with the pound sterling afflicted by the evaporation of international confidence the country was then on the brink of financial disaster and economic collapse...

It should be noted here, however, that in publicistic speeches of other kind — speeches of famous writers, public figures, peace fighters and so on there may be deviations from formality and a contrast is often to be seen between the highly formal and rather ordinary and in some instances even colloquial language, when various illustrations, examples, comparisons, jokes, quotations are produced. So a good speaker is aware of a proper balance be­tween intelligibility, pronounceability, relative dignity, formality and informality.

Having outlined briefly the spheres of the publicistic style manifestation we would like to concentrate now on the phonos-

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tylistic characteristics of a publicistic speech. Recent research in this field allows us to generalize certain prosodic configurations as applied to this register. These results are presented in Table 10 (p. 225).

Now, following the general scheme of a style description, we would like to describe the results of the opposition of a publicis­tic intonational style text and an academic lecture. We have chosen a lecture for the comparison because there are certain similarities and overlaps between these registers. The results of the opposition show that the differences which exist between these two types of public speaking are more striking than the similarities.

Public oratorial speeches are so removed from everyday in­formational narratives and so vividly marked on the grammati­cal, lexical and prosodic levels that are immediately recognized by listeners and labelled as oratorial skills and exercises.

As there is a very strong concern on the part of the speaker about the effects achieved by his speech on the listener, the former uses all kinds of oratorial performances which on the pro­sodic level are characterized by the incomparable variations and contrasts within the systems of pitch loudness, tempo and tim­bre accompanied by kinesic components.

These prosodic contrasts, very expressive facial mimics and gestures identify certain oral texts as belonging to publicistic in­tonational style.

It is undoubtedly clear that volitional .and emotional function of intonation is predominant in this register against the back­ground of other functions.

As any publicistic speech is fully prepared and even re­hearsed, it usually goes smoothly and with ease, without hesita­tion devices. It is marked by its dignified slowness, careful articu­lation and impressive resonance on the most important communi­cative centres and properly rhythmically organized. Of course, it is not always uniformly so. Occasionally a speaker may drift from the register and sound less formal or even chatty or needlessly dramatic. On such occasions the speaker tries to entertain the public and the speech is characterized by markers of declamatory, academic, informational or conversational styles. There are speakers who confess to a fierce prejudice against the discourse in a particular style only. They usually vary the registers thus achieving certain influential results. A certain amount of style variations is a must when we perform within publicistic discourse.

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Table 10

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