2. Extralinguistic situation and its main constituents:

a) purpose;

b) participants;

c) setting;

It is obviously necessary to try to explain what is meant by extralinguistic situation or factors. It is the sum total of factors which lie outside any possibility of signaling linguistic meaning. The analysis shows that any extralinguistic situation can be defined by three components, that is purpose, participants, setting. These components distinguish situation as the context within which interaction (communication) occurs.

Learning a foreign language the student, however, will often continue to interpret situations as he would in his own culture the result may be an inappropriate usage of intonation structure with the wrong meaning. For example, in Ukraine the leave-taking допобачення can be pronounced both with low rising and low falling tones, which sound neutral, while in English Good-bye! pronounced with a low falling tone sounds fairly rude, while rising tone makes it neutral.

Analyzing 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.

One of the most important style-modifying factors is the degree of spontaneity. So if we examine the situations in which people 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.

3. The problem of classification of phonetic styles.

An intonation style can be defined as a system of interrelated intonational means which is used in a social sphere and serves a definite aim of communication.

The choice of an intonational style is determined primarily by the purpose of communication and then by a number of other extralinguistic and social factors. There are differences between some authors about the number of functional styles and their names. Among the well-known classifications of phonetic styles the following two may be mentioned. One of them belong to S.M.Gaiduchic. He distinguished five phonetic styles: solemn, scientific business, official

business, everyday, and familiar. As we may see the above-mentioned phonetic styles on the whole correlate with functional styles of the language. The are differentiated on the basis of spheres of discourse. The other way of classifying phonetic styles is suggested by J.A.Dubovskiy who discriminates the following five styles: informal, ordinary, formal neutral , formal official, and declamatory. The division is based on different degrees of formality or rather familiarity between the speaker and the listener. Within each style subdivisions are observed. But as the author himself writes it is rather the principle of presenting the textx for description and analysis because “no theory has yet created a completely symmetrical classification of speech acts’.

M.A.Sokolova grounds her classification on intonation and singles out such intonation styles are as follows: 1. Informal style. (Conversational/Familiar.)

2. Academic style. (Scientific.)

3. Publicistic style. (Oratorial.)

4. Declamatory style. (Artistic/Belles-letters (fiction and drama.)

5. Informational style.

Poetic style is either included in Artistic style or investigated separately as the sixth intonational functional style.

Functional styles reveal their language peculiarities on a number of levels, including grammar, vocabulary and phonetics.

The formal means employed to mark different intonational styles in speech are all the main components of the prosodic system of a language:

- changes of pitch (range, level and contour);

- changes of energy (variations of stress and rhythm);

- changes of duration (tempo and pauses);

- changes of timbre or voice quality.

It is the relative frequency and the combinatorial peculiarities in the use of the above-mentioned prosodic features that chiefly serve as intonational style markers. But differentiation of intonation according to the purpose of communication only is definitely not enough. As was mentioned above, there are other factors that affect intonation in various extralinguistic situations. Any style with very little exception is seldom realized in its pure form. Each generated text is likely to include phonetic characteristics of different styles. In such cases we talk about overlapping (fusion) of styles.

To summarize we could say that the distinction of phonetic styles is a purely formal one because any particular theory while in use should control and give meaning to the descriptive statement. So in this respect the suggested classification is near to adequate way of reflecting numerous speech realizations, on the one hand, and on the other hand, it is the way to understand and interpret the system. If we attempted to systemize all our observations and account for all the options the task would prove daunting. What we need to do in teaching is simply to call attention to the most marked features of the style ignoring the relatively stable features.

Questions for self-control:

1. What is the subject of phonostylistics?

2. What are the main components of extralinguistic situation?

3. What does the choice of intonation styles depend on?

Lecture 13.

CLASSIFICATION OF PHONETIC STYLES.

1. Conversational style.

2. Academic style.

3. Publicistic style/

4. Declamatory style.

5. Informational style.

1. Conversational style.

The usage of conversational style is typical of natural spontaneous, everyday speech. It is the most commonly used type of intonational style and consequently a variety which will be more familiar to the vast majority of English-speaking people than any other. That is why it is called familiar. This kind of English is also a means for everyday communication, heard in natural conversational interaction between speakers. So phonetic stylists call it conversational. Some scholars also call it informal, because this style occurs mainly in informal external and internal relationships in the speech of relatives, friends, well-acquainted people and so on.

In informal situations, where speakers are more relaxed, less attention is given by them to the effect they produce on the listeners. It is the most situationally influenced kind of English.

Spontaneous, colloquial, informal conversations display certain common linguistic characteristics.

1. Firstly, talks of this kind are characterized by the inexplicitness of the language as the speakers rely very much upon the extralinguistic factors – context, kinestics, etc. This manifests itself in “incompleteness” of many utterances as the context make it clear what was meant by the speaker, thus making redundant its vocal expression/

2. Secondly, conversations are characterized by the lack of planning and the randomness of subject matter. They are very often unpredictable, not guided to an overall theme.

3. The third general feature of the conversational style talks is “non-fluency”. Informal spontaneous conversation is characterized by a high proportion of “errors” involving hesitation phenomena, slips of the tongue and all sorts of overlapping and simultaneous speech.

There are a few other points to be mentioned on the syntactical

level:

1. High proportion of parenthetic compound types of sentence introduced by you see, you know, I mean, I say and others.

2. Frequent use of interrogative sentence types and very few

imperatives.

3. Common use of vocatives, especially in initial position.

4. Rare use of nominal groups as subjects; the personal pronouns

are more in evidence, the informal you is quite common in its

impersonal function.

5. A great number of question tags.

6. The use of all sorts of repetitions and repetition structures.

Even adverbial ntensifiers such as very may be repeated

several times.

7. The occurrence of contracted verbal forms (he’s, I’ll, I’ve).

8. The frequency of colloquial ellipses.

On the prosodic level the following characteristics of conversational style should be noted:

1. Intonation groups are rather short, their potentially lengthy tone units tend to be broken. These short interpausal units are characterized by decentralized stress and

Sudden jumps down on communicative centres.

2. The heads are usually level, or rarely, falling. Falling heads

occur only in groups consisting of several stressed syllables.

3. As for the nuclear , simple falling and rising tones are common. Emphatic tones occur in highly emotional contexts. High pre-nuclear syllable are very frequent.

4. The tempo of colloquial speech is very varied. The natural speed

might be very fast but the impression of “slowness” may arise

because of a great number of hesitation pauses both filled and

non-filled (hesitant drawls). However, the speakers may

have no pauses between their parts, very often they speak

simultaneously, interrupt each other.