1.4.

Styles of Speaking and Forms of Talk

In discussing the nature of oral speech, Byrnes identifies four basic styles of
speech:
(1) spontaneous free speech, characterized by the interactiveness of the
situation (initiating, turn taking, leave taking, overlapping speech, and the like) as
well as by constraints on the speaker’s manner of production (resulting in
fragmental syntax, rephrasing, and speech errors of various types);
(2) deliberate free speech, such as that which is characteristic of interviews
and discussions;
(3) oral presentations of a written text, as in newscasts, more formal
commentaries, and lectures;
(4) oral presentation of a fixed script, such as that produced on stage or in a
film.
The range of linguistic varieties a speaker has at his / her disposal or verbal
repertoire includes (a) how a speaker varies the form in which a speech act is
coded and (b) the choice of particular strategies of interaction. Jakobson (119)
suggests that English allows for at least five styles of speaking:
(1) peer’s style;
(2) formal style:
(3) style appropriate for small children or when addressing them, that is, an
adults style comprehensible to small (not necessarily baby talk);
(4) informal style appropriate when talking to a close member of one’s
family;
(5) informal style appropriate when talking to an adult who is not a member
of the family.
When speaking about the style appropriate for small children mention
should be made of the way children acquire language. According to Wertsch (168),
in speech which accompanies manipulative actions, the child puts into linguistic
form primarily the changing part of the situation, sometimes what is new to it, the
psychological predicate, Contrarily to the segmentation of information into “given
and new’ in adults, where it is the listener’s position that counts, in the child the
segmentation is produced according to its own point of view, it is what the focus of
its attention that counts, attention is situationally dependent.
A young child in the early stages of language development is able to master
a number of elementary uses of language. Each of them has a choice of meanings
attached to it. Halliday calls them developmental functions of language, and
distinguishes seven initial functions (114):
(1) instrumental (‘I want’): used for satisfying material needs;
 (2) regulatory (‘do as I tell you’); used for controlling the behaviour of
others;
(3) interactional (‘me and you’): used for getting along with other people;
(4) personal (‘here I come’): used for identifying and expressing the self:
(5) heuristic (‘tell me why’): used for exploring the world around and inside
one;
(6} imaginative (‘let’s pretend’): used for creating a world of one’s own;
(7) informative (‘I’ve got something to tell you’): used for communication
new information.
At about 18 months, the child is beginning to master the adults system of
communication, including grammar, vocabulary and meaning components.
In mastering adult language children make several mistakes in pronunciation
and distort the phonetic shaping of words. Having analysed the speech of children
in works of drama, Misetskaya came to the conclusion that ‘all children actually
speak adult language’ (43:31). For example, one of the characters of T. Mozel’s
play ‘All the Way Home ’, the six-year-old Rufus says:
Ruf: “We sur-sur..."
Mary: ‘What are you trying to say?’
Ruf: ‘We sur-survived, didn’t we?’
Perceived in the speech flow of adults ‘an orphan’ turns into ‘a norphan’ as in:
Ruf: ‘Am I a norphan now?’
Mary: ‘An orphan?’
Studying stylistic modifications of the prosodic shaping of the speech
continuum, specialists in phonostylistics distinguish informational, scientific,
belle-lettre, publicistic and colloquial styles of pronunciation or phonostyles. But
contemporary phonostylistics has not had verified data yet of modifications of
sounds according to each of these intonational styles.
Spontaneous speech is not prepared beforehand, It is of a certain dual
character. On the one hand, it is unprepared (spontaneous), on the other hand, the
speaker uses the forms which are fixed and ready-made in the system of language.
A choice out of these forms is made in a concrete net of communication. Thus, the
peculiarities of spontaneous speech are:
(1) In spontaneous speech linguistic and non-linguistic features that convey
meaning and sentiment are interconnected in a subtle way.
(2) This explains a certain ‘contractedness’ of spontaneous speech
(abundance of elliptical and incomplete phrases) and increase of the
communicative role of prosody.
(3) Unpreparedness of spontaneous speech leads to various hesitation
phenomena, which increase in quantity with the growth of tension in the course of
the conversation. The character of hesitations depends on a number of conditions.
Thus, according to Ragsdale (144) the more anxiety the situation causes, the more
repetitions, stammering, restatements are registered. Filled hesitation pauses often
explicate the speaker’s unwillingness to lose initiative in conversation. These
pauses are a certain marker of incompleteness of what has been said. Hesitations
occur not only in the state of anxiety, but are frequently encountered in calm and
even slowed down speech. In other words, the speaker uses hesitation pauses or
repetitions not only when seeking a necessary word or phrase, but, probably, to add
more weight to his utterance too. Hesitations are more often at the beginning or in
the middle of the phrase, but these pauses may occur at phrasal junctures as well.
The more stereotypical phrases (clichés) the speaker uses the less hesitations he
produces.
(4) The structure of the spontaneous dialogue is determined by the character
of the speaker’s relations. Four types of these can be suggested:
1) the speaker can fully express his thought; the listener does not interrupt
him;
2) the interlocutors exchange roles in dialogue;
3) both participants express initiative in speaking (simultaneous talk). It
should be mentioned that the time of simultaneous talk does not usually exceed 2-3
seconds, that helps to regulate the length of a speech utterance;
4) both participants show no initiative in speaking; this results in silence.
(5) After the silence either a topic shift or a discussion on its new aspect
follows. There is no rigid plan of choosing topics in spontaneous speech. You
never can tell the end of the conversation, but you can detect certain regularities in
the development of the dialogue.
(6) Spontaneous speech is not fluent. Non-fluency in speech serves as a
signal for the change of remarks and can mark the boundaries between remarks. A
certain roughness is the norm of spontaneous speech. Speech becomes more
smooth and fluent in more serious settings.
(7) As for the syntactic structure, in spontaneous speech short phrases,
simple sentences prevail and there are many elliptical and incomplete phrases
there. Both complete and incomplete syntagms are
characteristic of it.
(8) There is a marked variety of melodical patterns with typical indentation
of melody: simple and compound tones, sliding and scandent scales besides
descending and level scales. The tempo of speech is unstable with frequent
contrasting changes.
(9) Spontaneous speech is rationally organized. The speakers choose only
those words, which are necessary for communication, Less important words are
omitted (usually subject-groups). The forms, which are necessary for ‘accurate
speech’ but do not carry the main meaning, are reduced. The notional words of
little informative semantics undergo considerable reduction too. The most
communicatively important words acquire stresses. The prominence of speech,
marked by a sharp tonal change, provides fast comprehension of speech by the
listener and gives him a possibility to almost simultaneously react to the
information heard.
Traditionally conversation is said to be coramitted to the following
paradigm: two and only two individuals are engaged together in it. Over the course
of the interaction the roles of speaker and listener will be interchanged in support
of a statement — reply format, the floor passing back and forth, finally, what is
going on is said to be conversation or talk.
The two-person arrangement here described seems to be fairly common,
being the one that informs about face-to-face interaction. But in fact in modified
conditions additional participants can be added, the conversation can take place in
the immediate presence of nonparticipants, and so forth
Typically, ritual brackets, besides several physical markers of copresense,
will be found, such as greetings and farewells, these establishing and terminating
free, official, joint engagement, that is ratified participation. So it is important to
examine a social encounter in terms of ‘moments’ of conversation.
The analysis of the use of the language means in communication is to be
carried out on discourse level in the up-down frame, that is, from discourse as a
whole down to its components. Thus, for example, analyzing classroom discourse
we see that ‘teacher talk’, or ‘comprehensible input’ can be called simulated
authentic discourse.
Some characteristics of authentic spoken discourse that are present in
‘teacher talk’ include
(1) a lower density of vocabulary than either scripted speech or written
discourse;
(2) a high redundancy of content, as ideas are repeated or restated often;
(3) less organization or structure than scripted or written discourse, with
many changes in grammatical structure, back tracking, false starts, and other types
of incoherence that characterize authentic free speech;
(4) speech that normally takes place in face-to-face settingsand requires
feedback from other participants (139: 129-131):
1. ‘Now listen everybody’.
2. ‘At ten o'clock we'll have assembly. We'll go out together and go to the auditorium and
sit in tke first two rows. Mr. Dick, the principal, is going to Speak to us. When he comes in, sit
quietly and listen carefully’.
3. ‘Don’t wiggle your legs. Pay attention to what I’m saying’.
According to Goffman (108:10), in conversation there occur
 several changes in footing . Footing is summarized by the author in
terms of:
1. Participant’s alignment, or set, or stance, or posture, or projected self.
2. The projection can be held across a strip of behaviour that is less long
than a grammatical sentence, or longer, so sentence grammar will not help us all
that much, though it seems clear that a cognitive unit of some kind is involved,
minimally, perhaps, a ‘phonemic clause’. Prosodic, not syntactic, segments are
implied.
3. A continuum must be considered, from gross changes in stance to the
most subtle shifts in tone that can be perceived.
4. For speaker, code switching is usually involved, and if not this then at
least the sound markers, such as: pitch, volume, rhythm, stress, tonal quality.
5. The bracketing of a ‘higher level’ phrase or episode of interaction is
commonly involved, the new footing, serving as a buffer between two more
substantially sustained episodes.
It should be stressed that though of great importance conversation is not the
only context of talk. In western society obvious talk can take the form of a
platform monologue, as in the case of political addresses, lectures, dramatic
recitations, and poetry reading. These presentations involve a text coming from a
single speaker who has been given a relatively large set of listeners and exclusive
claim to the floor. “Talk, after all, can occur at the town podium, as well as the
town pump’ (108:137),
There are some cases of podium talk, as, for example, church congregations
of the revitalist type wherein an active interchange is sustained of calls and
answers between minister and churchgoers.
Whether one deals with podium events of the recreational, congregational,
or binding kind, a participation framework specific to it will be found, and it will
be different from the one generic to conversation.
Of interest are extended service transactions. Take, for example, mother-
child pediatric consultation in Scottish public health clinic, reported by Strong
(157). Here a mother’s business with a doctor is apparently bracketed with little
small talk, very little of preplay and post play, although the child itself may be the
recipient of a few ritual solicitudes. The mother sits before the doctor’s desk and
briefly answers the questions he puts her, waiting patiently, quietly, and attentively
between questions. It is not a real speech situation. What is being sustained then, is
not a state of conversation, but a state of inquiry.
Storytelling requires the teller to embed in his own utterance the utterances
and actions of the story’s characters. And a full-scale story requires that the
speaker remove himself for the telling’s duration from the alignment he would
maintain in ordinary conversational practice, and for this period of narration
maintain another footing, that of a narrator whose extended pauses and utterance
completions are not to be understood as signals that he is now ready to give up the
floor.
An important area of its investigation, is therefore the relationship between
language choice implied in code switching on the one hand and extralinguistic,
social factors such as setting, topic and interlocutors on the other.
Metaphorical code switching does not depend on the change in a speech
situation, but on the meaning that the speaker intends to convey. It may therefore
occur within the same speech situation and has to do with the communicative
effect that the speaker wants to achicve in the verbal exchange.
The concept of metaphorical code switching is further explored by Gumperz
(113), who introduces an alternative term, conversational code switching, and
moves away from the dichotomy between situational and non-situational code
switching (an approach used by Weinreich (166) and Ervin-Tripp (100). Instead,
he focuses on the multiple discourse stylistic functions that code switching may
serve.
Code switching can be used to mark the distinction between direct and
reported speech, i.e. it is used in quotations, it can mark interjections to clarify or
emphasize a message and, finally, it may be used to qualify the message.
Valdes-Fallis (161) for instance, does the same, only her categories are
slightly different. Code switching can be used for emphasis, contrast, narration,
preformulation (linguistic routines), quotation, repetition, paraphrase and
parenthetical or personal use. McClure’s (136) categories include quotation,
addressee, specification, focus, clarification, elaboration, attention attraction or
retention, and personalization vs. objectivization.
A quite different approach to explaining the functional dimensions of code
switching is emplyed by Scotton (153), and by Scotton and Ury (154). They
introduce the concepts of social arena and strategy.
Bilinguals use code switching as a strategy for social negotiations. By
switching codes they may assume one of the multiple roles that they have in
relation to other interlocutor/s and redefine a particular interaction to become
appropriate in a different social arena (the arenas include three types: identity,
power and transaction).
An example of code switching is switching into the ‘motherese’. When
children appear in the scene , adults tend to use child language (43). For example,
in T. Rattigun’s play ‘Separate Tables’ the adults address their five-month-old
baby:
 Jean: (to the unseen baby). ‘Tum along now. Tum along. Tum and see Daddy-Daddy will
give you a little tiss and then beddy-byes isn’t it, my little lammy kins?’
and Charles, mimicking Jean also used child words:
Charles: ‘Now talk baby up to beddy-byes, dear, and leave
Daddy to his worky-perky-or Daddy won't ever become a docky-wocky.’
The speech addressed to children is characterized by manifestation of
expressive prosody, which serves to highlight the emotional effect upon the
interlocutor (44). High emphatic tones, high pre-heads, compound tonal contours,
nuclear back shifting, ic. a marked location of the ° nucleus, etc,, reflect a social
orientation toward the listener’s age and at the same time create the general
atmosphere of warmth and care.
Summing up we would like to emphasize the complex character of speech
communication, the functional diversity of language uses, manifested in speech as
a heterogeneous phenomenon which is characterized by linguistic variability
related to extralinguistic reality.