Phonostylistics

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Theme: PHONOSTYLISTICS

PLAN

1 About phonostylistic

2 What is phonostylistics

3 The main types of phonostylistic processes

4 Phonostylistics in a Second Language

5 Experiments

6 Problems of phonostylistics

Main literatures

1 ABOUT PHONOSTYLISTIC

Every standard language is characterized by a range of speech styles, which encompasses not just the segmental aspects but such paralinguistic features as the pace at which speakers habitually deliver their utterances. In this respect American English is unexceptionally variegated, even though most speakers fall into fairly narrow categories when it comes to pace of delivery. Typically, the truly idiosyncratic speaking styles are those that are categorized by speech mannerisms, including dialectal peculiarities in otherwise normative speech.

The qualification «ponderous» or «portentous» applies to speech that is so painfully slow when compared to general norms as to stand out as stylistically inappropriate regardless of the speaker's predilections. Moreover, when the content is utterly trivial or plebeian, utterances delivered at a labored and gravid pace can only try an interlocutor's patience and create the impression (among others) that the speaker has nothing to say. Those who speak at the same pace regardless of what they are saying run the risk of seeming dull and colorless.

Speaking a language is like playing a musical instrument. A gavotte played at a tempo appropriate to a dirge will not set anyone to dancing.

PHONOSTYLISTICS

The term style is used in sociolinguistics to refer to «the variation that occurs in the speech of a single speaker in different situational contexts» (Cheshire 1992: 324). The variants come from a single language or dialect, «though it is recognized that the same social and psychological principles govern switching of language, of dialect, and of style» (Cheshire 1992: 324). Situational contexts are typically described in terms of relative formality. The factors triggering stylistic variation have been identified as topic, setting and relationship between interlocutors (Hymes 1974). Some languages have discrete styles, i.e. they impose co-occurrence restrictions on forms within a given style. The most influential approach to stylistic variation was that of Labov (1972), who analysed formality as a linear continuum from very casual speech to very careful speech according to the degree of attention given to speech by speakers. In his newest paper, however, Labov (in Eckert and Rickford eds. 2001) states that he did not intend this continuum to describe how style-shifting is produced and organized in every-day speech but rather to describe the intra-speaker variation in the sociolinguistic interview. Discussion in the contributions to Eckert and Rickford (eds. 2001) volume shows no unanimous approach to the study of stylistic variation. There are at least three major aspects of the study: quantitative, qualitative and functional. I believe that they should be unified for the benefit of comprehensiveness. My definition of phonostylistics does not aspire to be sociolinguistically comprehensive.

2 WHAT IS PHONOSTYLISTICS

The term phonostylistics stands for the phonological processes conditioned by style, i.e. style-sensitive or style-dependent ones. A scale of styles may be set up in a variety of ways, still it is generally encompassed within the extremes of emphatic vs. informal, with formal in between. Emphatic style is well-exemplified by motherese and citation forms, informal styles include casual, colloquial, intimate, while a speech, a lecture, or a job interview are examples of a formal style. For the purposes of clarity, I will refer to a simplified binary distinction between formal vs. informal only.

As far as the informal style is concerned, there exists the whole array of terms in the literature used to refer to approximately the same type of speech: fast, rapid, allegro, casual, connected, informal, real, spontaneous, or conversational. With respect to the primary style-differentiating criteria, the term casual seems to be the most adequate or, indeed, the least narrow or vague. The criteria are: tempo of speech and attention paid to speech. The criteria take on different values depending on the situation in which a speech act takes place (topic, aim, relation to the interlocutor, place of a conversation) and on the individual features of the speaker. Most commonly, exactly those situations do arise which trigger casual speech, i.e. in other words, most often we speak casually. The relationship between the two criteria is inversely proportional: the higher the degree of attention the slower the tempo.

phonostylistic tempo speech attention

3 THE MAIN TYPES OF PHONOSTYLISTIC PROCESSES

The main types of phonostylistic processes are:

- assimilations, e.g. of stops and nasals, as in: that pen, good mother, could get, ten men; palatalization and coalescence, e.g. in: did you, hit you, don't you, as yet

- reductions, e.g. cluster reductions and degeminations, as in: a test drive, I asked him; smoothing, as in: hour, lawyer

- hiatus avoidance, e.g. in: law and order; situation

- assimilation + reduction, e.g. in: I can't go, don't be silly

- reduction and elision of vowels conditioned by rhythm in iso-accentual, stress-timed languages, e.g. perhaps

- consonant epenthesis, e.g. in: prin [t] ce, min [t] ce.

I propose a graphic way to represent stylistic variation (Dziubalska-Koіaczyk 1990: 20; see Figure 1 below). Underlying intention is a term compatible with the mentalistic, psychological theory of the phoneme (cf. such notions as Lautabsicht, sound image, intention, in the works of Baudouin de Courtenay, Sapir, Stampe).

For instance: underlying intention happen / / , realization in production []. Further illustrations of phonostylistic processes are quoted below:

Figure 1

And also by using a low impedance you can use two conductors shielded.

Conversational style:

and - > >

also - >

using - >

impedance - > , + >

you - : > >

can - > >

shielded - > , + >

TOTAL: 13 PROCESSES

Reading:

and - >

a - (hypercorrection)

can - >

conductors - + >

shielded - >

TOTAL: 7 PROCESSES

4 PHONOSTYLISTICS IN A SECOND LANGUAGE

According to the popular view, phonostylistic processes are automatic, phonetically conditioned, serve ease of articulation, and as such they arise automatically at a given stage of second language competence. There is a number of problems connected with this view, however. Firstly, phonostylistic processes are language-specific. The same function is served by various means across languages, but also within a language. Languages decide for some out of many ways to overcome articulatory difficulty, which is demonstrated by language-specific speaker-friendly casual speech processes. For instance, a coronal stop or fricative palatalises easily and even coalesces with the following palatal glide within words and across word boundaries in English (cf. would you, as you, immediately, etc.) whereas in Polish this never happens (kot j№ does not become koci№). Thus, the choice of a process serving ease of articulation in L2 cannot be random (and thus cannot be automatic). This means that even if the learner is successful in targeting second language underlying intentions (e.g., with the help of the methods outlined above, working against «repair»), still the second language casual speech processes will not necessarily be triggered, since there is more than one «natural pronunciation» (phonetically motivated one) resulting from those intentions.

Secondly, the problem with the acquisition of phonostylistics of a second language is that the level of attention in a SL does not drop low enough to trigger a natural application of those processes. Even in a natural setting of SLA, certain forms get fossilized before they get the chance to be productively derived. Once such fossilization happens, the subsequent drop in attention due to the natural setting conditions does not bring the expected application of the casual speech processes.

L1 interference is stronger in casual speech (if a learner manages to reach casual speech level) due to the lack of or difficulty in control over articulation. A vicious circle arises: we want the learners to reach casual style (correlated with low level of attention), but at the same time we want them to apply L2 processes and not succumb to L1 interference (caused by low level of attention).

Additionally, phonostylistic processes are the most difficult to decode from the non-native language input (cf. Figure 1 above). A frequent result of this difficulty is learning lexicalized versions of utterances with processes already present in them without the learners realizing this, e.g. L2 English Would you like..., with palatalization and yod-coalescence already applied.

The primary reason, thus, for teaching phonostylistic processes is to enhance this decoding ability, i.e. to facilitate perception and enable the learner to establish an underlying representation. In this way, teaching phonostylistics creates a bridge towards learning phonology of a second language in general.

5 EXPERIMENTS

In a series of experiments, since 1984, (Dziubalska-Koіaczyk 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, see Dziubalska-Koіaczyk 1990) I investigated the role of formal vs. natural setting in SLA. The experiments showed that natural setting learners (there were 21 subjects) did not differentiate among styles and used rote-learned, lexicalized versions of casual speech forms with no evidence for a productive application of casual speech processes. For instance, they produced assimilated form in Tell me what you want, but not in Has your letter come, What's your weight? Don't miss your train. Formal setting learners (20 subjects), on the other hand, demonstrated some productivity in the application of phonostylistic processes in their English, which pointed to the effectiveness of formal instruction, training and exercise.

Zborowska (1997) obtained statistically significant progress in perception and production of basic casual speech processes of English in Polish learners due to the regular explicit training in phonostylistics (she compared an experimental group with a control one whose members received a traditional instruction).

Blanco, Carrillo & Gayoso (1999) showed that phono-metaphonological training raised substantially the metaphonological awareness of Spanish school children learning English, which proved very helpful to the children in all production skills, i.e. reading, writing and pronunciation.

Dziubalska-Koіaczyk, Weckwerth and Zborowska (1999) reported that students of English found the metalinguistic knowledge they acquired in a descriptive grammar course very useful in learning practical skills, i.e. in perfecting their performance. For instance, out of 62 students, 40 acknowledged metacompetence as background for performance (cf. the quote from one of the subjects: «theoretical knowledge helps to create a mental image of how sounds are produced»), 10 confirmed that metacompetence helped them in acquiring connected speech phenomena.

Linda Shockey (1997) conducted a perception experiment of gated reduced speech by native and non-native speakers of English and showed that while native listeners unravelled the reductions to arrive at the correct input, non-native listeners practically did not. The experimental sentence was: The scree [m] play di [n] resemble the book at all. She concluded that exposure to a range of inputs which are phonetically different but phonologically the same (cf. Figure 1 again) will aid comprehension of naturally-varying native speech. I would reinforce her conclusion and add explicit training to pure exposure.

Summing up, if we take into consideration both the idea of working against «repair» by the learner and the above discussed «metacompetence» issue, we may propose a basic two-way phonostylistic distinction relevant to the learner:

- near-intentional speech = is a formal style (listener-oriented), for which the naturalness principle defines the obligatory minimum of processes (basically, language-specific allophonic processes); the learner uses L1 intentions and processes as well as «repair» at the beginning of acquisition; s / he needs to ultimately learn to hear SL intentions and to apply SL processes to derive SL productions

- average speech = is a casual style (speaker-oriented); this is a style which we use most often in every-day life; it is correlated with a low level of attention paid to the way of speaking; the learner hears the strings either as above (here «repair» may be successful if L1 and L2 happen to have the same casual speech process, e.g. nasal assimilation) or at their «face value» (since what s / he hears does not match any familiar intention either in L1 or in L2, e.g. palatalization and coalescence); it's harder to learn to hear the intention here, since it's further removed from production

«COMPETENCES» IN THE LEARNER'S MIND. A methodological remedy against the difficulties mentioned above and analogous difficulties in other areas of second language grammar is to raise language awareness of the learners, i.e. to make them aware of the «competences» they already possess. Phonostylistics is a particularly good starting point since casual speech is the most common and the most natural register speakers use, cf. average speech. It is exactly via second language casual speech processes that a learner should come to «reconstruct» the second language system, and this with the help of explicit formal instruction. If the instruction concerns formal speech only, the learner will hardly succeed with unravelling the real language input.

L1. Language awareness can be raised through the mediation of the first language (L1) whose positive role in SLA should be emphasized. For instance, realizing the existence of phonostylistics in the mother tongue activates self-organizing capacities of the language system.

Thus, in the case of teaching English to native speakers of a given language, the learners' L1 should constitute an important fundament of the teaching procedure. L1 corpora and descriptions as well as contrastive L1-L2 analyses are a prerequisite for the preparation of appropriate materials.

Dialects and other L2's. It is easier to raise the linguistic awareness of those learners who already possess the ability of code switching, either inter-dialectal or inter-lingual, by drawing their attention to this ability. Code switching could perpetuate to yet another code - an L2 in question, especially if the new code is typologically cognate. The importance of the learner's local dialect as a determinant of learning characteristics has been pointed out, for instance, by James and Kettemann (1983: 9). Students should be taught how to use their dialectal base in the learning of a second language. Code switching between dialect and standard should be used to their advantage rather than disturb the acquisition process. Here for instance one may think of an advantage speakers of Hawaiian Creole English have due to their ability of code-switching between American English and HCE.

Similarly, prior knowledge of other languages should be taken advantage of. Thus, the most suitable native language and prior language(s) input should be selected to serve as basis for deriving second language forms.³ Again, speakers of HCE would have an advantage for instance in learning Japanese (e.g. due to the tendency to open syllable structure in HCE, among others; cf. Odo 1977). In general, multilingualism of Hawai`i creates very favourable circumstances for language learning.

Socio-pragmatics of L2. Above sections emphasized the teaching about L2 by means of reference to L1 as well as to other languages and dialects known by the learners. Another important aspect of teaching about L2 (raising the awareness of L2) is not to isolate grammar from its actual context. Especially when teaching in the formal setting, grammatical processes should not be taught «raw», but should always be placed in their respective socio-pragmatic framework of usage.

CONCLUSION. In this paper I have claimed that speech is in the ear of the listener. Only if we properly understand mental activities of the learner confronted with SL input can we help him / her in successful acquisition of a SL. We need to understand and aid perception in order to trigger desired production.

What is a successful acquisition of a second language, however? Does the learner, for instance, lose his / her foreign accent when s / he stops to use the «engineered» intentions and starts to perceive the expected L2 ones instead? Is this a necessary prerequisite to acquire second language phonology? As a final note, let us try to specify what can actually be meant by the term native speaker of a language.

A native speaker (NS) is a person who uses a given language without hesitation: s / he possesses one stable form of pronunciation (would vary styles, or even dialects, but in each of them would always hit the target) and never ponders about quality of a sound (no self-reflection, or self-correction). S / he also never ponders about how to react in a given situation: acts spontaneously by means of a spoken language, doesn't look for words or phrases or idioms in a casual interaction. Pronunciation is thus only part of the characteristics of a native speaker.

A native speaker does not necessarily speak a version of a language identifiable as a standard or a generally identified dialect: the fact that s / he uses his / her language in the above described manner makes her / him a native speaker, and thus his / her language a version of the language in question (be it a creole, pidgin or dialect / accent); this means that a native speaker's speech may even be accented by a foreign tongue.

Thus, to be a native speaker one needs to immerse in the target language environment in childhood, when one may become a native speaker of a number of languages as long as there is enough exposure to them from the start (including parents, caretakers); however, the exposure should be balanced and evenly distributed over all spheres of life (this is possible e.g. in countries with multiple official languages). Consequently, it is hardly possible to become a native speaker in the full sense of the term by means of a formal training, or even immersion later in life (since all learners are already native speakers of their respective tongues). It is possible, however, to achieve native-like pronunciation by means of a formal training.

In this paper I have made some suggestions concerning the usefulness of phonological knowledge in the acquisition of second language pronunciation.

6 PROBLEMS OF PHONOSTYLISTICS

The primary concern of linguistics is the study of language in use. It's particularly relevant for phonetic studies. We're interested in how the phonetic units are used in various social situation. It's the extra linguistic situation that influences our choice of language means.

There's a special branch of linguistics that studies the way language means function in different situation. It's called functional stylistics. It's primary concern is functional style - a set of language means used in a particular situation.

Phonostylistics is the study of the way phonetic units, both segmental (sounds) and suprasegmental (intonation), are used in a particular extralinguistic situation.

Extralinguistic situation consists of 3 components.

1) The purpose. It's the most important factor that guides the communication. The purpose is what you want to achieve (to get / give information, to instruct, to entertain, to chat). The aim is very important as far as pronunciation is concerned.

The subject matters less important but it stil matters.

This factor can bring numerous variations in pronunciation which are determined both by individual characteristics of the speaker and the character of their relationship.

We must consider individual and socio-cultural features: the social status, social group or class the speaker belongs to.

2) Participants. Another important aspect is the character of participant relationship which is reflected in the tenor (тональность) of discourse: formal / informal, friendly / unfriendly, SOMETHING and it effects greatly the choice of linguistic means.

The social roles of the speaker are also important. We have authority subordination relationship (teacher - pupil)

3) Scene / setting. This component has several factors:

- physical orientations of the participants (the distance between people, proximics studies it)

Setting can be also described in the following terms: public / non-public, formal / informal, monoloquing / poliloguing, dialoguing.

It also includes the cannel of communication: face to face, public presentation, telephone, mass media. (аксиальное - радиальное)

All the components of extralinguistic situation influence the choice of linguistic means.

The Classification of Phonetic Styles.

1. Gaiduchic (correlates with functional styles of language)

- solemn (торжественный);

- scientific business (научно-деловой);

- official business (официально-деловой);

- everyday (бытовой);

- amiliar (непринуждённый).

2. Dubovsky (degrees of formality):

- informal ordinary;

- formal neutral;

- formal official;

- informal familiar;

- declamatory.

3. Ours (the purpose of communication):

- informational;

- academic;

- publicistic;

- declamatory;

- conversational.

MAIN LITERATURES

1. Baudouin de Courtenay, Jan. 1895. Versuch einer Theorie phonetischer Alternationen.

2. Strassburg-Cracow. An abridged translation An Attempt at a Theory of Phonetic Alternations in Edward Stankiewicz (ed.) 1972.

3. A Baudouin de Courtenay Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 144-212.

4. Blanco, Mercedes, Marisol Carrillo & Encarna Gayoso. 1999. Primary school learning of EFL through phono-metaphonological training. PTLC99 (Phonetics Teaching and Learning Conference) UCL, London, 14-15 April 1999.

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